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LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
PRINCETON. N. J. 
PRESENTED BY 


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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/artofhelpingoeopOOdesc 


THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 
OUT OF TROUBLE 


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OF HELPING PEO 
OUT OF TROUBLE 


BY 
KARL ‘DESCHWEINITZ 





BOSTON AND NEW YORE 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
The Riberside Press Cambridge 


1924 


COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY KARL DE SCHWEINITZ 


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 


Whe Riverside Press 
CAMBRIDGE - MASSACHUSETTS 
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 


TO 
JESSIE DESCHWEINITZ 


Here in the maturity of print is the companion of our evenings and 
our holidays. How much a part of the household it has been! 
When the manuscript went to the publisher, you said that it was 
like having a child leave home, and in the book that has come 
back to us we shall see even more than the familiar features of a 
member of the family. We shall find a remembrance of shared 
experience and of being together, of cherished intimacies and a 
common enterprise, a keepsake of all that life has been, a pledge of 
all that we would have it be. 


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CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION 


. THE ART OF LIVING 

. THE ART OF HELPING 

. WHEN TO HELP 

. WHAT ONE MUST KNOW 

. SELF-REVELATION 

. THE SOURCES OF UNDERSTANDING 
. FACING THE FAcTS 

. INTERPRETATION 

. MEDIATION 

. PLANNING 

. THE CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 
. MOTIVATION 

. DYNAMICS 

. IN CONCLUSION 


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156 
179 
203 
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INTRODUCTION 


THE purpose of this book is to describe a method 
of helping people out of trouble. The principles 
underlying this method are applicable, not only 
when one is with an individual whose personal 
affairs are at a crisis, but whenever one finds him- 
self so placed that he may influence other people 
— whether as parent, teacher, employer, or neigh- 
bor, whether with patient, parishioner, friend, or 
client. 

It is a method both old and new, old in that its 
point of view toward life and many of its processes 
has been appreciated and used by understanding 
men and women since human beings first began 
to live and work together, new in that not until 
recent years has a sustained and directed effort 
to cultivate it been made. 

This effort is being carried on by social workers 
and is inspired by their experience in meeting the 
perplexities and difficulties of the people who seek 
their help in clinics and hospitals, in schools and 
courts, in children’s and family welfare or charity 


Xx INTRODUCTION 


organization societies, and in many other institu- 
tions. 

The method that has thus been developed has 
come to be known as social case work. The prac- 
tice of it as applied to the more complicated forms 
of trouble is a vocation requiring, in addition to 
native ability, special knowledge and much prepa- 
ration and training. There are many situations, 
however, in which this method may be of help 
to any one who can sympathetically interpret its 
spirit and its principles. Social case workers, hav- 
ing found it effective in the lives of those whom 
they serve and in their own lives also, believe that 
its point of view should form part of the philoso- 
phy of everybody and that an understanding of 
its processes would be useful in the daily relation- 
ships of life and particularly to those persons to 
whom other people turn for advice and guidance. 
It is in the interest of a wider application of social 
case work that this book has been written. 

Social case work is not a panacea. While it can 
be helpful to any one in any economic or social 
status, it is not a cure of economic and social evils. 
Although an interpretation of it as universally 
applicable obviously avoids emphasis upon any 
one group of people, it must be remembered that 


INTRODUCTION x1 


where economic and social conditions are adverse, 
as they are for thousands of human beings, all the 
problems of life are aggravated, trouble is induced 
where trouble might otherwise be avoided, and 
its treatment is rendered vastly more difficult. 
The present discussion holds it to be axiomatic 
that only as environment and the organization of 
society improve can men and women hope to 
reach their fullest self-expression. 

In illustrating the principles of social case 
work, I have made frequent use of incidents and 
crises that have arisen in human lives. Names 
and other identifying details have been changed. 
I hope that these stories will not lead the reader to 
think that the helping of people out of trouble is 
an instant and easy process. It is difficult, a mat- 
ter usually of months and years, with many fail- 
ures. Even some of the experiences which here 
appear to be successes were later followed by dis- 
aster, for just as a man may recover from one 
disease only to succumb to another, so, too, an 
individual, after overcoming one difficulty, may 
be overwhelmed by the next, or, as not infre- 
quently happens, he may suffer from nervous and 
mental instabilities that prevent any permanent 
solution of his problems. Again and again the 


Xli INTRODUCTION 


person who helps, and the person who is helped, 
struggle through mistake after mistake to achieve 
but a modicum of what they had hoped. Yet, 
despite all this there are successes, successes that 
more than justify faith in social case work as a 
method of helping people out of trouble, and asa 
key to the secret of a happier association with our 
fellows. 

In the preparation of this book I have been 
helped by many persons, but particularly by my 
associates in the Philadelphia Society for Organ- 
izing Charity. Their insight and understanding, 
their experience and their skill are the inspiration 
of much that appears in the pages which follow. 


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OUT OF TROUBLE 


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THE ART OF HELPING 
PEOPLE OUT OF TROUBLE 


CHAPTER TE 
THE ART OF LIVING 


My cook wears a smiling, healthy, rather pleasing face. He isa 
good-looking young man.... One day I looked through a little 
hole in the shoji, and saw him alone. The face was not the same 
face. It was thin and drawn and showed queer lines worn by old 
hardship....I went in, and the man was all changed — young 
and happy again.... He wears the mask of happiness as an eti- 
quette. (The Japanese Letters of Lafcadio Hearn.) 


LivInG has yet to be generally recognized as one 
of the arts. Being born and growing up are such 
common experiences that people seldom consider 
what they involve. As most readers of books pass 
from cover to cover, realizing not at all that the 
letters which form the words are the product of 
painstaking craftsmanship and that the imposi- 
tion of the type upon the page, the composition of 
the title-piece, the binding of the volume, are the 
result of centuries of study and design, so also we 
take as a matter of course the miracle of being 
alive, and the comings and goings of the men and 
women about us. 


2) (THE ART OF HELPING PROPER 


No matter how close our neighbors, no matter 
how intimate our friends, we rarely appreciate the 
effort by which they achieve a mastery of life. 
This is a thing that they keep to themselves. Ex- 
cept in such moments of self-revelation as that in 
which Lafcadio Hearn found his Japanese cook, 
human beings truly wear the mask of happiness as 
an etiquette; since all the while they are engaged 
in a constant and relentless struggle. 

For man is not born into a world made to fit 
him like a custom tailored suit of clothes, or a 
house built to order. He enters a universe that 
was eons old before his appearance, and that in 
all likelihood will continue for eons after his de- 
parture, an infinitely complex, eternally changing 
universe that evolves its processes unmindful of 
his presence. It sets the conditions. It is man 
who must do the fitting. 

The task engrosses his every moment. He 
must adjust himself to the changeless laws of 
nature. He must adapt himself to the men and 
things about him. His very life at birth depends 
upon his ability in an instant to oxygenate his 
blood from the outside air instead of through the 
circulatory system of the mother. Within a very 
few hours he must learn the process of digestion. 


THE ART OF LIVING 3 


As he grows older, he must accustom himself to 
variations in temperature, to the passage of the © 
seasons, to the peculiarities of his physical en- 
vironment. He must develop immunity from the 
swarm of bacterial parasites. Failure in many of 
these things may mean an end to his existence; 
yet they are the least perplexing adjustments he 
must make. For mostly they are automatic. Ina 
sense they are beyond his conscious control. It is 
rather the adjustments to people and to events 
that involve the most vivid struggle. It is these 
which make the greatest demands upon his 
character and ability, and they throng every 
minute of every day. 

His waking must be determined, not by the 
sun, but by the demands of his occupation. The 
time of breakfast and the food upon the table are 
the result of adjustment to the convenience and 
tastes of the different members of the household. 
His clothes must suit the weather and the day’s 
engagements. He must adapt himself to train 
schedules, traffic regulations, library rules. He 
must compromise between his income and his 
needs and desires. Adaptations must be made to 
the house and to the neighborhood in which he 
lives, to manners and customs, to the organiza- 


4 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


tion of business, to the city, to the country, to 
accidents, to old age, to birth, to death. 

Man is like a canoeist directing his course 
through waves. One after another he meets them. 
They may be heavy and powerful or they may be 
light ruffles of a sunshiny day in midsummer. He 
must ride them all. To each one he must slant his 
craft, dipping his paddle at just the right moment, 
giving it just the right twist, putting just the 
right amount of force into the stroke. Each wave 
requires a decision. Let him fail in judgment, or 
in skill and strength, and his canoe may ship 
water until it fills, or, in the lift of some great 
breaker, overturn immediately. 

And as upon the ocean, a wave occasionally ap- 
proaches which overtops its fellows, so, too, in 
life there towers before the voyager not infre- 
quently a ‘ninth born son of the hurricane and 
the tide.’ These waves call forth all the skill that 
the mariner possesses. He who rides them may 
well count himself a master of the sea, for while 
the lesser adaptations of life cause many a wreck, 
it is these which occasion the greatest disasters. 
Would one learn to appreciate the art of living, he 
need but observe the manner in which people 
meet these portentous relationships and events. | 


THE ART OF LIVING 5 


Such are the adjustments to adolescence, to in- 
dependence, to marriage, to single life, to widow- 
hood, to a marked change in income, to sickness, 
to physical handicaps, to work, to parenthood, to 
disappointment in love, to the first visit away 
from home, to school, to college, to divorce, to 
home after the children have grown up and left it. 
Life is full of other similar situations. Not all of 
them are met by everybody, and people who have 
been confronted by the same problem find that to 
each individual it has presented itself in a different 
aspect. Yet one need study only a few of these 
experiences to realize that underlying all is the 
fundamental question of adjustment. 

During adolescence there is the adjustment 
that accompanies the awakening of the child to 
the world outside the home. Hitherto the mother 
has been the refuge of sympathy and understand- 
ing, the father the source of recreation and adven- 
ture, and both the final authority upon questions 
of taste, of information, and of right and wrong. 
The boy — and in this he usually anticipates the 
experience of his sister — now discovers a kin- 
ship with those of his own age and develops an in- 
creasing respect for their standards of life and 
conduct. He becomes impatient of parental 


6 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


‘mays’ and ‘may nots,’ all the more so because 
with the burgeoning of a new physique he is con- 
scious of aspirations and emotions that he thinks 
the apparently staid and settled middle years 
cannot appreciate. He demands emancipation. 
He wants to be himself. 

This spiritual emergence from the confines of 
the home does not often occur in a girl until she 
goes to work or to college. It then becomes a 
struggle for independence. Up to this time her 
goings and comings have been more closely super- 
vised than those of her brother. In many house- 
holds she is more her mother’s daughter than she 
is herself. And now a greater freedom is opened to 
her. Going to work gives her the power of earned 
money and the broadened horizon of new com- 
panions. Going away to college brings her new 
associates and removes her from the immediate 
oversight of her parents. The result of either ex- 
perience is to face her and her parents with much 
the same adjustment that her brother met in 
adolescence. The children seek self-expression 
and a larger control over themselves. The parents, 
regarding them still as children, want to continue 
to protect and direct them. Therein lies the pos- 
sibility of conflict and the difficulty of the adjust- 


THE ART OF LIVING fi 


ment. If the parents draw the bonds of authority 
closer, if they place walls about the home, youth 
rebels, sometimes to yield to sullenness or to an 
irritable discontent, sometimes to break away 
from the life of the family altogether and to re- 
place it with unstable and unsatisfactory friend- 
ships. If, however, mother and father recognize 
the right of the children to their own lives, the 
reason for conflict will disappear. Best of all is 
that attitude of the parents toward both daughter 
and son which fosters a gradual unfolding and in- 
creasing of the girl’s and the boy’s responsibility, 
so that this phase of the adjustment to adoles- 
cence and independence never becomes critical 
or even conscious, but takes place as part of the 
evolution from childhood to youth and from 
youth to adult life. 

The adjustment to marriage involves an institu- 
tion that, ever changing, is yet ever the same. It 
varies as human beings vary. In the homes of 
neighbors it may exist in the tradition of one 
hundred years ago and as a prophecy of what it 


Ns aaa 
_ The twentieth century finds it a more demo- 


~ cratic and a more spiritual relationship than ever 
it has been before. Man is now an integral part of 


8 OTHE ARTiOF HELPING PEOPLE 


the family in contrast to the days when he was 
lord and the woman subject. Then he was in a 
sense superior to the family and outside of its 
laws. For spiritual and intellectual companion- 
ship he looked to other men, and both before and 
in marriage, society condoned in him a standard 
of sex morality different from that which it de- 
manded of his wife. 

To-day, woman, with vastly increased oppor- 
tunity for education and with an extension of in- 
terest to all human activities, offers to man a 
relationship that is rich in its intellectual and 
spiritual possibilities. She is capable of a fineness 
and delicacy of appreciation that challenges his 
understanding, while the single standard of sex 
morality causes the physical basis of marriage to 
be of increasing significance. 

Even the appearance of the home has become a 
factor in determining the success of the associa- 
tion of husband and wife. The business of financ- 
ing and administering the household calls forth 
ever greater ability and the growing appreciation 
of the psychology of childhood has added to the 
importance of the family as an educational insti- 
tution. 

_ Marriage is the most complicated of all adjust- 


THE ART OF LIVING 9 


ments, for the man and the woman must adapt 
themselves, not only to a new task and a new en- 
vironment, but they must determine the form of 
that task and the character of that environment, 
and they must do this, not each for himself, but 
together. Two individualities, two sets of likes 
and dislikes, and of manners and mannerisms, 
two sexes, two products of different inheritance 
and experience, must combine to give expression 
to a new entity, the family. It is the most inti- 
mate of all relationships. In it there is no such 
thing as the impersonality which simplifies asso- 
ciation with human beings in other situations. 
Always there is the intangible emotional factor, 
capable of thwarting every attempt at adjust- 
ment or of making easy the adaptation of per- 
sonalities whose union would otherwise be im- 
possible. Analyze it though one may, marriage 
will continue to escape definition. It will be dis- 
cussed and debated through the coming genera- 
tions as it has been through the past, and yet will 
ever hold the quality of mystery, offering to its 
votaries‘an enduring source of happiness. 

_As the adjustment to marriage is not accom- 
“plished in a day, but must be made as long as the 
man and the woman continue to be husband and 


10 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


wife, so also the adjustment to single life is a 
process of years. With a woman it begins usually 
midway between twenty and thirty. She is then 
mature, but not so settled that adjustment to 
another personality would be difficult. She is 
physically best equipped for the bearing of chil- 
dren. She has completed her formal education. 
If she has been at work, she has served her ap- 
prenticeship. All that has gone before has been a 
preparation. Nature and custom define marriage 
and motherhood as the next step. But the same 
intangible factor which can make or mar marriage 
cuts across her path. She does not meet the man 
with whom she would mate. 

This is not a decision that can be made finally. 
The possibility of marriage affects her plans for 
ten or fifteen years, or even longer. If, as now 
most single women do, she turns toward a career, 
she is not likely to make the same whole-hearted 
adjustment to it as that of which a man is ca- 
pable. Uncertainty about the future renders it 
difficult for her to be constant in work. 

Unless she finds opportunity for achievement 
in Civic activities, or in business, she may develop 
a feeling of ineffectiveness because of what she 
may consider to be her failure to marry. She may 


THE ART OF LIVING . II 


think that there is a questioning in the minds of 
her friends, and in so thinking she may become 
supersensitive in her relations with other people. 

Far more serious and more difficult of adjust- 
ment than either the feeling of uncertainty or that 
of ineffectiveness is the lack of an emotional out- 
let. That part of the single woman’s nature 
which in marriage would be directed toward lover, 
husband, and child has not this trinity of the af- 
fections. In its place she must find a medium for 
expression. The quality of her relationship with 
her parents and the other members of the family 
becomes therefore of greater importance to her 
than to her married sister. This is true of all her 
friendships, particularly of her friendships with 
women. As she grows older, she probably finds 
her association with men increasingly casual and 
infrequent. She must replace this with other 
interests, taking care to avoid the dangers of an 
ingrowing existence that expresses itself in a 
frigidity in personal relationships or in a parasitic 
emotion for some other woman. 

To chart a straight course through the shoals 
and reefs of single life, to attain to the happiness 
of dignified and affectionate friendships, to keep 
a sense of proportion and balance, to maintain a 


1) ‘THE ART OB, HECPINGIPEOPLE 


tolerance of temperament and attitude is truly an 
achievement. Yet women are making this adjust- 
ment, developing in the process richer personali- 
ties, and sounding new depths of understanding 
and appreciation. 

The single man usually is close to thirty years 
before his thoughts are affected by the fact that 
he is not married. With him marriage is not a 
career as with woman. It is rather a motive fora 
career. Lacking this, he must combat a feeling of 
futility. He has no one for whom to labor. The 
tendency in the single woman toward instability 
in work becomes with him an instability in his 
manner of living. He has no sense of permanence 
in abode or in his social relations. Helping still 
further to unsettle him is the solicitude of his 
friends. He is never allowed to forget that he 
ought to be married. There is always the implica- 
tion of a responsibility shirked. 

The instinct to parenthood is generally not so 
dynamic a force in him as in woman. It rarely 
develops until after he becomes a father, but 
there is a compensating instinct to protect. Fre- 
quently this transfers itself into loyalty and devo- 
tion to his mother, who may, particularly if she is 
a widow, consciously or unconsciously, play upon 


THE ART OF LIVING 13 


this instinct, preventing both his marriage and 
the free development of his career. 

In making the adjustment to single life, the 
man must guard both against a devotion of this 
kind which hinders him from attaining to a true 
self-expression, and against a self-centered exist- 
ence that at the worst may drift into sensuality. 
At the best he may, in adjusting himself to single 
life, achieve an intense application to work and 
a variety of interests and friendships that can 
bring him a large measure of happiness. 

Widowhood, like all other adjustments, pre- 
sents itself under a multitude of varying circum- 
stances. The widowhood which follows a happy 
marriage is primarily the adjustment to a great 
loneliness, a loneliness that is both spiritual and 
physical. Life has hitherto been arranged on a 
communal basis; the family instead of the individ- 
ual has been the unit, every responsibility has 
been shared, the habit of intimate association 
with another person has been formed. Now this 
is all changed. Some people attempt to fill the 
empty place by summoning memories of the past 
and idealizing the one who has gone, a form of sub- 
stitution which if indulged too greatly may degen- 
erate into self-pity and a withdrawal from whole- 


14 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


some activity. Far wiser is it to rely upon work 
and other interests, inside the home or without, in 
which variety and inspiration can play their part. 

Children both simplify and complicate the ad- 
justment. They provide an outlet for the affec- 
tions, but they offer the temptation to emotional 
dependence. Some parents become almost par- 
asitic in this respect, handicapping the children 
in their efforts at self-expression and preventing 
them from the freedom which their development 
requires. Even where this does not happen, the 
problem of training and of education is most difh- 
cult. The mother must be both father and mother. 
Hitherto, the children have had the benefit of the 
thought and experience of two people. Widow- 
hood involves a loss which the mother cannot 
make up by duplicating herself through the de- 
votion of more time and energy. She must seek 
other contacts and other associates for her chil- 
dren to compensate them for what their father 
would have contributed. 

When it is the father who has been left, the 
problem becomes still more perplexing. Only too 
often in the absence of the mother the family 
breaks. She has been the home, and without her 
the whole structure collapses, leaving the hus- 


THE ART OF LIVING 15 


band to make a new adjustment to single life, and 
the children to face the whole series of difficulties 
which confronts those who are homeless and 
orphaned. 

Sickness involves a twofold adjustment, the ad- 
justment which the patient must make to his 
disease and that which his family and his friends 
must make to him. In either case the crux of the 
problem is much the same. What is he able to do 
and what is he unable to do? What exertion is 
wise and what is not wise? When should he yield 
to invalidism and when should he refuse to listen 
to the suggestion of ill-health? When should he 
reconcile himself to a continuance of nursing and 
when should he resume activity? When should 
his friends take care of him and when should they 
expect him to take care of himself? It is a pro- 
blem that the diagnosis of the physician cannot 
always solve, for it has as much to do with the 
spirit as with the body. Often, the commiseration 
of friends and their desire to pamper is a more 
insidious foe for the patient to overcome than the 
bacteria of his disease. 

Sometimes sickness affects the attitude and ex- 
pression of the invalid so that he becomes a differ- 
ent person from what he would wish to be. Then 


16. THE ARTOPSHEMPINGIPEOPLE 


all that experience, insight, and understanding 
can provide are required by his friends so that 
they can appreciate the reasons for his otherwise 
inexplicable behavior, and make the necessary al- 
lowances for it. This is particularly true when the 
man is not confined to his bed, but is suffering one 
of the minor and less apparent chronic illnesses. 
Wherever sickness appears, it brings new and un- 
foreseen problems. There are few things that more 
quickly precipitate the true character of an indi- 
vidual and his friends. 

Work is one of the most important of adjust- 
ments because it is chief among the mediums 
through which a man expresses his personality. 
Let Colas Breugnon describe it: 

‘There is one old chum that never goes back 
on me, my other self, my friend — my work. 
How good it is to stand before the bench with a 
tool in my hand and then saw and cut, plane, 
shave, carve, put ina peg, file, twist and turn the 
strong fine stuff, which resists yet yields — soft 
smooth walnut, as soft to my fingers as fairy 
flesh; the rosy bodies or brown limbs of our wood- 
nymphs which the hatchet has stripped of their 
robe. There is no pleasure like the accurate hand, 
the clever big fingers which can turn out the most 


PHEVART OF (LIVING Ly 


fragile works of art, no pleasure like the thought 
which rules over the forces of the world, and writes 
the ordered caprices of its rich imagination on 
wood, iron, and stone.... To serve my art the 
elves of the sap push out the fair limbs of the 
trees, lengthen and fatten them until they are 
polished fit for my caresses. My hands are docile 
workmen, directed by their foreman, my old 
brain here, and he plays the game as I like it, for 
is he not my servant too? Was ever man better 
served than [?’’ 

Here was a well-adjusted workman. He had 
what every one needs: an employment in which 
his faculties had the freest possible play. Happy 
is that person who finds this in his pursuit of a 
livelihood. A man cannot expend too great pains 
in the search for appropriate employment. Some- 
times it is a quest of years, involving many trials. 
The more encouragement, therefore, should we 
offer the youth who, after leaving school or col- 
lege, experiments with a number of different oc- 
cupations. Instead of being reminded of the dis- 
mal proverb about the rolling stone, he should be 
received with sympathy and with interest and 
should be helped to discover the best channel for 
self-expression and service. 


18 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


Sometimes this means creating in his present 
employment the desired opportunity. Imagina- 
tion and invention can often delve into their own 
environment and find the seeds of growth. There 
are, however, many jobs that are so mechanical, 
so limited in scope, and so monotonous in the 
activities which they require, that there is little 
hope for self-expression in them. Those who earn 
their living in such ways, if they cannot change 
their work, should seek place for the play of their 
faculties in an avocation. There are many exam- 
ples of this. Hawthorne’s interest was writing, 
but he supported himself for years by a clerkship 
in a customs house. A man may be an operative 
in a factory and yet may make the art of pho- 
tography his work, and not infrequently an 
inspired evangelist is concealed within the over- 
alls of a janitor or behind the leathern apron of a 
cobbler. 

Self-expression in work includes more than the 
achievement of brain and hand. It is dependent 
also upon the quality of the association that the 
individual has with his fellows. The office and the 
shop stand next to the home in the adaptability 
that they require of people. They are the very 
crossroads of life where personalities meet and 


‘THE ART OF LIVING 19 


pass and where there are multitudes of human 
contacts. 

Truly the adjustment to work is enough alone 
to call forth all the skill that a man possesses. 
What renders it and every other adjustment vastly 
more difficult is the presence at the same time 
of other problems. It is not possible for him to 
concentrate upon work to the exclusion of every- 
thing else; for while he is making this adaptation 
he may also be confronted with the adjustment to 
illness or with the necessity of helping his son to 
meet the problems of adolescence. The adjust- 
ment to widowhood may be accompanied by a 
sudden change in income. The adaptations to 
single life and to unemployment may appear to- 
gether. The adjustment to marriage may include 
the adjustment to parenthood. 

Rarely do adjustments come alone and rarely 
do they concern only one person. Usually a 
number of people are affected. In marriage, man 
and woman_and the relatives of both may be in- 
volved: in independence, the woman and _ her 
family; in work, employer and employee; in sick- 
ness, the invalid and the household. 

The problem is always complex, and it is uni- 
versal. All about us the struggle is going on, and 


20 THE ART OF*HELPING ‘PEOPLE 


in it human beings everywhere are engaged; 
silently, perhaps, and with countenances as cheer- 
ful as that of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese cook, but 
none the less intently. Event succeeds event; 
accidents, people, happenings, one after another 
come toward us. Each must be met and dealt 
with, and upon the manner of our dealing de- 
pends the issue of our lives. If successful, men 
say that we are happy. If unsuccessful, they say 
we are in trouble. For this process of adjustment 
is life, and the mastery of it is the art of living 
which, who that considers the stakes, will deny 
to be the greatest of all the arts. 


WEE Reo Lt 
THE ART OF HELPING 


Behavior — fresh, native, copious, each one for himself or 
herself, 

Nature and the Soul expressed — America and freedom ex- 
pressed — In it the finest art, 

In it pride, cleanliness, sympathy, to have their chance, 

In it physique, intellect, faith — in it just as much as to manage 
an army or a city, or to write a book — perhaps more, 

The youth, the laboring person, the poor person, rivalling all 
the rest — perhaps outdoing the rest, 

The effects of the universe no greater than it; 

For there is nothing in the whole universe that can be more effec- 

- tive than a man’s or woman’s daily behavior can be, 
In any position, in any one of these States. 
WALT WHITMAN 


GREATEST of all the arts, living is also the most 
exacting in its demands upon its practitioners. It 
delights in crises. It chooses its own times and 
seasons, considering neither the convenience nor 
the preparedness of its followers. It may present 
itself in some instant dilemma or it may develop 
its problems so gradually that one does not realize 
that an adjustment is at hand. It appears char- 
acteristically in the sort of cumulative sequences 
that seem to pile difficulty upon difficulty, giving 
rise to the saying that troubles never come singly. 
Age, youth, wealth, experience — none of these 


22 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


does it spare or respect. It compels the attention 
and the energy of all mankind. 

It is the most exacting of the arts, but it is not 
beyond mastery. Men have achieved it, are 
achieving it constantly. Rare is he who has not a 
fundamental capacity to adjust himself to life. 
When a man fails where his neighbors succeed, 
when under substantially the same economic and 
physical conditions and in the same crisis he falls 
into trouble which they avoid, it is not necessarily 
because he lacks the ability to achieve. It may be 
because he is prevented from using the powers with 
which he has been endowed. He is blocked; he is 
handicapped; he is not free. He is bound by 
habits, emotions, fears, prejudices, superstitions. 
He is thwarted by those with whom he is inti- 
mately associated in work or in pleasure, even by 
his friends, by the members of his family. He is 
thrust into trouble as was the little girl whose 
teacher said of her: 

“If Martha is learning anything I don’t know 
it. She never answers any questions. She never 
has anything to say in class. She just sits and 
looks.”’ 

So stupid did Martha appear to be that until an 
examination at a psychological clinic showed that 


THE ART OF HELPING og 


she was of sound mind, it was thought that she 
might possibly be feeble-minded. The difficulty 
had its chief cause in the behavior of the child’s 
mother. 

Martha’s parents had wanted their first born to 
be a boy. That the baby should have been a girl 
was a great disappointment, and when a son came 
as their next child, Martha was thrust into the 
second place. Harry was given precedence in 
everything. Reproach was always her portion. 
She was continually being compared with her 
brother to her own disadvantage. 

She would hear her mother tell visitors: 

“‘Martha is stupid, but Harry is bright. Why, 
Harry even has to help Martha with her lessons.” 

If it was suggested that Martha run an errand, 
her mother would say: 

“Oh, Martha can’t do that. I’ll have Harry do 
E20, 

When an operation to remove adenoids was 
prescribed for Martha, her mother exclaimed in 
her presence: 

‘‘Martha will never go to the hospital. She’ll 
just cry. I'll never get her to go.” 

On another occasion the child was obliged to 
listen to this comment upon her character: © 


24) THE ART ORME E RING EUPLE 


‘‘When Martha gets a nickel, she keeps it to 
herself. Harry buys candy and gives it to the 
other children. But not Martha. You wouldn’t 
catch her giving anything away. She’s sort of 
sly.” 

Is it surprising that Martha should have been 
silent in school? Ever since she had been able to 
remember, her every effort at self-expression had 
been discouraged before it had had so much as a 
chance to start. Daily she was being told that she 
was an inferior person, that she was capable of 
nothing, and that she amounted to nothing. She 
was bound as effectively as if she had been in 
chains. She was shut up within herself by the very 
person who should have fostered her develop- 
ment. She was not free to adjust herself to life. 

Only after the mother had been shown the part 
she was playing in her daughter’s unhappiness did 
the child begin to receive the opportunities she 
needed. A changed atmosphere at home and 
special attention in school released her from her 
handicaps and stimulated her in the use of her 
abilities. Not many months had passed before the 
mother herself said: 

‘“‘There’s the greatest difference in Martha. 
She’s a changed girl.” 


THE ART OF HELPING 25 


It is seldom that trouble is so exclusively due to 
the limitations which people place around an in- 
dividual. Usually it is brought about by a com- 
bination of restrictions from without and inhibi- 
tions within. This is illustrated by the difficulty 
which Stuart Weston found in making one of the 
most common adjustments, the adjustment to 
sickness. 

His disease was tuberculosis. He had been ill 
for three years. Most people in such a predica- 
ment follow the advice of a physician and take the 
cure at a sanatorium. This Weston did not do. 
Despite the urging of his friends and his medical 
advisors, he remained at home, working inter- 
mittently, as his health permitted. Gradually he 
grew weaker. His family also suffered. At the 
end of three years his wife was showing the strain 
of having his invalidism added to the care of five 
boys and girls. Two of the children had developed 
symptoms suggestive of tuberculosis, and dis- 
couragement had settled down over the whole 
family. 

The causes of this failure to make the adjust- 
ment to sickness lay partly with Weston and 
partly with the people and things about him. He 
had been prejudiced against the State Sanatorium 


26. THE ARTiOb OBE LPING PEOPLE 


by false reports of how its patients suffered from 
neglect. A young woman who had lived across 
the street from his home had gone there and died. 
Weston thought he might meet the same fate. He 
was afraid, also, that if he should go to the sana- 
torium, his mother-in-law would see to it that 
there would be no home awaiting him when he re- 
~ turned. He and his mother-in-law had never been 
able to endure each other. If he was self-sufficient, 
self-reliant, and self-assertive, so too was she, and 
at every point they clashed. Weston suspected — 
perhaps not wholly without justification — that 
she would use his absence to induce his wife to 
come and live with her. This meant to him that 
Mrs. Weston, who lacked the force to resist so 
strong a will, would become a drudge at the 
boarding-house which her mother conducted, that 
the children would be placed in institutions, and 
that the life of the family would be broken. 
Along with this fear was Weston’s feeling that 
he was being overlooked. His pride was hurt by 
the attitude from which he thought people now 
regarded him. In the years when all was well, he 
had been the head of the household. He had made 
the decisions and his will had dominated every 
plan. Now that he was sick, those who had come 


THE ART OF HELPING 27 


to help him failed to consult him about his family. 
Conversation with him was limited to efforts to 
persuade him to enter the sanatorium. Gradually 
he came to feel that he was regarded only as 
something to be got rid of, a case to be sent away 
whether he wanted to go or not. His hurt feelings 
blocked his judgment. He was no longer free in 
thought or in action, and he remained at home. 

The social worker who was asked to help recog- 
nized that here lay the heart of Weston’s diffi- 
culty. She appreciated his desire to plan for him- 
self and his family, and began at once to seek his 
advice at every step, bringing his wife into their 
discussions, so that his decisions were not solitary 
as they had been before his illness, but were made 
with Mrs. Weston participating. As soon as 
Weston realized that his opinion was being con- 
sidered, and that he was once more a factor in the 
destinies of the household, he ceased to feel the 
pique which had been blocking his judgment. He 
could now think much more clearly about his 
disease and the appropriate treatment. 

The fear that his mother-in-law would break 
up his home could be allayed only by assurances 
from the woman herself. These were procured by 
an appeal to her sympathies. Weston was ex- 


28 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


plained to his mother-in-law. She was shown that 
the traits to which she objected were, after all, 
only the evidences of a strong character; that it 
was his very devotion to his family which kept 
him at home, and that his whole hope of recovery 
lay in his going away to the sanatorium in an easy 
frame of mind. The mother-in-law was persuaded 
at least to the point of neutrality, and, indeed, a 
little beyond, for she helped in the preparations 
for Weston’s journey. 

Meanwhile, Weston’s prejudice against the 
State Sanatorium had been met by efforts to ar- 
range for his admission to another institution. 
While the attempt was unsuccessful, it showed 
Weston that he was not being forced to go where 
he did not wish to go; and when it was suggested 
that in the absence of any other place he make a 
trial of the State Sanatorium, with the under- 
standing that if he did not like it he should return, 
he went quite willingly. It is a long-established 
principle of human nature that to say ‘‘you 
must’’ when a man says “I won’t”’ only makes 
his ‘‘no”’ the firmer, while to set him free to do as 
he pleases dissipates his opposition and releases 
his energies for a wise decision. 

Even more difficult than the adjustment which 


THE ART OF HELPING 29 


the sick person must make to his illness is that 
which is often involved for the other members of 
the household. Certainly, this was true of the 
problem with which Mrs. Slater was confronted. 
Following an attack of influenza, her husband 
had found it difficult to recover his strength. He 
could not summon his energies in the way that for 
the past few years had made him a valuable and 
trusted workman. He left a steady job and began 
wandering about the country. Sometimes he sent 
money to his family. Sometimes he did not. 
Sometimes he wrote home and sometimes he for- 
got todo so. Finally he consulted a physician who 
returned paresis as the diagnosis. The prognosis 
was a slow mental deterioration that would 
finally leave him wholly irresponsible. 

Mrs. Slater could not accept this fact. She 
would not believe that her husband’s illness was 
serious or that he was not a competent human 
being. She continued to expect him to be the 
person he-had been and to play his usual part in 
the family life. When he failed to do so, she 
showed a resentment that occasionally expressed 
itself in a sharp and exacting attitude toward Mr. 
Slater as guilty of desertion and non-support, 
but more often in a bitterness toward other 


30 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


people and in a struggle for the rehabilitation of 
her husband that took her attention from home — 
and children. 

This failure to adjust herself to her husband’s 
illness was chiefly due to her unwillingness to face 
the disappointment that the acceptance of it in- 
volved. Mrs. Slater came of an industrious, 
orderly, hard-working stock, thrifty, steady, 
home-abiding people to whom the unusual seldom 
happened. Mr. Slater was her great adventure. 
He swept into her life with a picturesqueness and 
a glibness that thrilled and fascinated her. His 
had been a vagabond youth, spent chiefly at the 
races where he knew the bookmakers as well as the 
horses. He was all that Mrs. Slater’s family was 
not; careless about money, ready to trust every- 
thing to chance, and a most interesting person. 
Mrs. Slater sensed a certain dubiousness in the at- 
titude of her relatives and became engaged with- 
out having confided her love affair to any one. 

Within a year after her wedding, it became 
evident that she had married a dissipated fellow 
who was given to drunken sprees and who could 
not be depended upon to provide for himself and 
his family. Frequently during a period of six or 
seven years she was obliged to seek shelter with 


THE ART OF HELPING 31 


her parents for him and the children. She felt his 
failure keenly, and her pride forbade her the 
relief that she might have had by unburdening 
herself to her mother. 

Then there came a great change in Mr. Slater. 
He awoke from one of his sprees to a sense of sin. 
He was converted from his old ways. He joined a 
rescue mission, and for four years he was a man to 
be pointed out as an example. This was the hap- 
piest time in Mrs. Slater’s married life. She could 
now be proud of her husband. He was the suc- 
cessful head of his family, a steady workman, and 
a leader in the church. Her judgment in marrying 
him was vindicated. 

It was this period of happiness that the develop- 
ment of paresis brought to a close. Mrs. Slater 
could not believe that it was the end. She had 
only just become accustomed to prosperity. She 
had participated vicariously in her husband’s 
achievements. Her romance had come true. 
That it must_ all-cease was too terrible to think 
about. She could not adjust herself to the new 
situation. She was too beclouded with emotion to 
face the facts. 

Yet it was precisely this which she must do if 
she was to be of any use to herself or to her hus- 


32 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


band or to the children. The social case worker 
whom she consulted began a work of interpreta- 
tion that continued for months. She prepared 
Mrs. Slater for the doctor’s report that it was 
paresis, not influenza, which was affecting Mr. 
Slater. She explained the course which the dis- 
ease might be expected to take and how it might 
affect his behavior. When Mrs. Slater insisted 
that the pain which her husband suffered after 
the use of salvarsan indicated that the doctors 
did not know anything about his trouble, the ex- 
periences of other people were cited as proof that 
this was the frequent consequence of these treat- 
ments. When Mr. Slater in a sudden flash of 
energy enjoyed a brief prosperity, the social 
worker kept in touch with Mrs. Slater so that she 
could prepare her for the ultimate collapse. Al- 
ways what had been foretold about the disease 
took place, until Mrs. Slater began to perceive 
what was inevitable. 

She had lost her husband. He could no longer 
be the source of interest and inspiration which, 
despite his weaknesses, he had always been to her; 
but there were the children, which in the struggle 
of the past months she had neglected. Here wasa 
means of renewal and strength. Could she dis- 


THE ART OF HELPING 33 


cover in the care of them an outlet for the energy 
which had been going into the vain attempt to 
prove that her husband was a normal man, she 
might achieve a measure, at least, of happiness. 
An opportunity was found for her to spend a day 
or two a week as a mother’s helper in a family 
where she might observe what child training can 
mean. This gave her a new vision, while the fact 
that she was appreciated by her employer brought 
her assurance and confidence for the meeting of her 
own problems. Gradually the hope that she had 
built upon her husband’s recovery was transferred 
to an interest in the education of her children and 
the making of her adjustment had been begun. 
The principles involved in the solution of Mrs. 
Slater’s problem were fundamentally the same as 
those underlying the treatment of the difficulties 
of Weston and of the little girl who was silent in 
school. Each one of these persons was blocked by 
fears and inhibitions of various kinds. They were 
stopped from the free use of their energies. They 
needed to be released from the cramping influ- 
ence of unfavorable associates and of their own 
emotions. For the little girl this was accomplished 
by giving her greater opportunity for self-expres- 
sion in school and by helping her mother to under- 


34 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


stand her. For Weston it was done by sympa- 
thetically interpreting him to his mother-in-law 
and by enabling him to return to a larger self- 
determination both in the making of plans for the 
family and in the selection of the place in which 
he would try to overcome his disease. For Mrs. 
Slater it was achieved by assisting her to face the 
dreaded fact of her husband’s mental condition, 
and by finding for her in the welfare of her chil- 
dren a new channel for activity. 

The details of what was done for each of these 
persons varied, but the goal of the work was the 
same. Whatever processes are followed in helping 
a man out of trouble, whether or not they consist, 
as here, in interpreting people to each other and 
to themselves, in stimulating initiative and in 
opening opportunity for self-expression, they 
should all focus upon the task of releasing the in- 
dividual from the misunderstandings, the inhibi- 
tions, and the restrictive influences that block his 
development, and of encouraging him always toa 
higher use of his abilities. To help a man in this 
way is to prepare him for the making of all his ad- 
justments and to set him upon the road to the 
mastery of the art of living. Let life be ever so 
exacting, it yields itself to him who is free. 


CHAPTER HT 
WHEN TO HELP 


The principle of guidance cannot be separated from the thing 
guided. It recalls a parable of Charles Kingsley’s which he re- 
lated to Huxley. A heathen khan in Tartary was visited by a pair 
of proselytizing moollahs. The first moollah said, ‘O Khan, wor- 
ship my God. He is so wise that he made all things!’ Moollah 
Number Two said, ‘O Khan, worship my God. He is so wise that 
he makes all things make themselves.” Number Two won the day. 
(JoHN Burrouaus, in ‘A Critical Glance into Darwin,” Atlantic 
Monthly, August, 1920.) 


THE first and the hardest lesson to learn about 
people who are in trouble is that they can be 
helped only if they want to be helped. There is no 
such thing as making an adjustment for some- 
body else. Only the husband and wife can make 
the adjustment to marriage; only the mother and 
father can make the adjustment to parenthood; 
only the widow to widowhood. No one can live 
another person’s life. No one can overcome a 
single disadvantageous habit for him. No one can 
make him strong by working for him. Noone can 
make him think by thinking for him. Whatever of 
happiness an individual achieves depends funda- 
mentally upon himself. However great the op- 
portunities that may be offered to him, however 
wise the suggestions that may be made to him, 


96) DHE ART OR PUR ENG PEO rinus 


unless he himself is desirous of profiting by them, 
they can accomplish nothing for him. 

What causes this lesson to be especially diffi- 
cult to learn is the instinct to help that dwells in 
all of us, an instinct so powerful that often we can- 
not resist its impulses. Frequently it forces us to 
spend our energies in trying to help where help is 
untimely, where the individual is not ready to 
change, and where, therefore, he benefits not at 
all, or, at least, very little by what we do. 

The only satisfactory approach to helping a 
person out of trouble is that which is made in re- 
sponse to a request for help. This need not be a 
formal request. It may be conveyed by a look or 
in a chance remark. Like the patient who seeks a 
physician for the relief of the symptoms of his 
disease rather than for the cure of the malady | 
itself, the individual in difficulty may ask assist- 
ance in something incidental to the real problem. 
The girl whose difficulties with her family have 
culminated in her running away from home may 
inquire about a job, but a question or two will 
show her trouble to lie deeper. A man may seek 
a loan when actually his difficulty is a maladjust- 
ment to work. 

The desire for help may be variously indicated, 


WHEN TO HELP 37 


but there must be at least some sign of dissatis- 
faction or some stirring of the urge to better 
things. Occasionally one will be placed in such a 
professional or friendly relationship that he can 
stimulate this desire, but usually, unless its pre- 
sence is evidenced by an appeal for assistance, an 
attempt to give advice will start under unfavor- 
able auspices and with little chance of success. 
Without such a request, how can we tell whether 
the person in trouble has any confidence in us and 
in our ability to be of service? 

Often what we, looking at a life from without, 
may think is trouble may not be trouble at all, 
but only a different way of living from that 
which we prefer. Husband or wife out of a far 
more intimate knowledge than ours may be able 
to discount each for the other words or behavior 
that seem to us intolerable, while parents may 
have a far more healthy relation with their children 
when they are alone with them than when they 
are conscious of being observed. Or it may be 
that an individual may willingly endure handi- 
caps in his personal life because other things are 
more important to him. That sometimes is the 
price of genius. It is frequently through the 
storm and the stress of unfulfilled emotion, 


83 OTHE ART QPP EUPING PEOPLE} 


through trouble and unhappiness, that the great 
achievements of art and science are attained. 
Until such an individual indicates that he wants 
advice, it is not for us to urge our services upon 
him. 

There are, however, situations in which one is 
justified in intervention even against the will of 
the person in difficulty. These are when a man is 
demonstrably incapable of managing his own af- 
fairs, when he is so neglectful of his children as to 
endanger their morals and their physical well- 
being, or when he does this deliberately, and when 
he is a menace to the health and life of his associ- 
ates. Society has recognized such conditions as 
prejudicial to its welfare and has established laws 
and a definite procedure for dealing with them 
when they arise. For the person who is of unsound 
mind, it is possible through the courts to have a 
guardian appointed, and, if necessary, to have the 
mentally defective individual committed to an in- 
stitution. The court can take children from 
parents who are ill-treating or neglecting them, 
and in many States the department of health has 
authority to remove from his home the diseased 
person who is endangering the health of his family 
and of his neighbors. There is vast room for dis- 


WHEN TO HELP 39 


cussion about when a man is incapable of manag- 
ing his own affairs and when he is a menace to the 
health and life and morals of others, but experi- 
ence in bringing questions of this sort before the 
courts enables public health officials and social 
case workers to know what evidence will be re- 
quired by judges and lawyers; and when a family 
appears to be suffering by reason of the actions of 
one or more of its members, it is wise to consult 
the appropriate municipal department or social 
agency before acting. 

Except in situations of this sort, intervention 
that is not invited runs the risk of failure. This 
may mean having to watch a friend’s distress 
grow greater and greater when we feel certain 
that we could be of assistance. Often, however, 
matters must become worse before they can be- 
come better. Sometimes a man must reach the 
depths before the realization of his misery be- 
comes strong enough to imbue him with the will 
to achieve a solution of his problems. 

There is always the hope that he may of his 
own strength be able to overcome his difficulties; 
and this is vastly more important than that we 
should have the satisfaction of aiding him. The 
sense of achievement and of power that springs 


40 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


from meeting and making his own adjustments is 
too precious a possession to be denied to any 
human being. That which makes for the develop- 
ment of the person in trouble, which increases his 
strength, which adds to his character, should be 
the goal of every one who truly cares for other 
people; and there is nothing which will do more to 
forward the winning of this goal than the solu- 
tion of a man’s problems by himself. 

It is when he decides that this is not possible 
that the time for help comes. So long as he does 
not run counter to the lives of others, our service 
to him is greatest when we await his call for as- 
sistance; when we undertake the art of helping 
only after having been asked to help. 


CHAPTER: IY: 
WHAT ONE MUST KNOW 


When you meet with a fact opposed to a prevailing theory, you 
should adhere to the fact and abandon the theory, even when the 
latter is supported by great authorities and generally adopted. 
(CLAUDE BERNARD, quoted by René Valléry Radot, in his Life of 
Pasteur.) 


To help a man out of trouble one must know and 
understand him. This would seem to be axio- 
matic. The surgeon does not operate until he is 
intimately acquainted with the physical condi- 
tion of his patient. The lawyer does not venture 
an opinion upon a contract without first inform- 
ing himself about the legal issues involved. Before 
ever ground is broken, the architect has ascer- 
tained how much stress each floor of the projected 
building will bear. No one would entrust a watch 
to a jeweler who began by indiscriminately potter- 
ing among springs and pinions instead of intelli- 
gently endeavoring to discover what was wrong. 
Certainly, then, when the difficulty concerns a 
human being, we should approach its adjustment 
from as complete a knowledge and understanding 
of him as it is possible to obtain. 

Yet knowledge and understanding are precisely 


42 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


the elements most frequently lacking in human re- 
lationships. Although people have learned the 
value of the fact in science and in dealing with 
material things, they have still to make any 
general application of it in their association with 
each other. Here supposition usually has prece- 
dence over information. Prejudice outranks ev- 
idence and impulse comes before reason. There 
is no better proof of this than the number of 
voters, who, without so much as an attempt at 
verification, allow their electoral decisions to be 
influenced by the slanders which are whispered 
about the personal lives of political candidates. 
The world made up its mind about revolutionary 
Russia before it had learned to know either 
Russia or the revolution; and it is not only the 
schoolgirl, who, without inquiry into causes, pro- 
nounces as ‘stuck up’ the acquaintance who does 
not notice her as she passes by. 

This failure to appreciate the importance of ex- 
amination and understanding enters even into the 
family circle. It jeopardizes the harmony be- 
tween husband and wife and makes difficult the 
bringing-up of children. Mark Twain’s account 
of how Aunt Polly punished Tom Sawyer for 
breaking a sugar bowl, which he had not broken, 
is typical of what happens in many homes. 


WHAT ONE MUST KNOW 43 


One evening, it will be remembered, Aunt 
Polly caught Tom stealing sugar from the table 
and rapped his knuckles by way of reproof. 
Later, while she was out of the room, Sid, Tom’s 
usually well-behaved half-brother, reached for 
the sugar bowl. It slipped between his fingers 
and fell to the floor. Aunt Polly returned and dis- 
covered the fragments. Tom awaited the punish- 
ment of the offender, not without a certain sense 
of satisfaction, but ‘‘the next instant he was 
sprawling on the floor! The potent palm was 
uplifted to strike again when Tom called out: 
‘Hold on, now, what er you belting me for? Sid 
Brokett! 

‘Aunt Polly paused perplexed.”’ She had pun- 
ished the wrong boy. Of course, she was too 
proud to confess her error, and, overcome with 
self-pity, Tom stalked away into the night. Life 
was awry between nephew and aunt. If only 
Aunt Polly had stopped-to learn the facts! 

She was, however, no different from the rest of 
human beings in this respect. One need not look 
far to find many repetitions of her mistake. 
There was Mrs. Brown whose relatives were es- 
tranged from her because of the constant crying 
of her baby. The family blamed the mother’s 


44 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


lack of firmness. They said that the child cried 
because he had not been properly trained. He 
had all the appearance of health, and so it did not 
occur either to the mother or to the relatives that 
he might not be well. Finally, the situation be- 
came so uncomfortable for Mrs. Brown that she 
left her home. The difficulty was brought to the 
attention of a social case worker, who suggested 
that the baby be examined by a physician. A 
slight intestinal trouble was discovered which an 
operation corrected. The boy ceased his fretful- 
ness and the cause of difference between the 
mother and the relatives was removed. 

Social case work abounds in similar illustra- 
tions, showing how dependent upon facts human 
problems are for their solution. It is seldom pos- 
sible to recognize at sight the nature of another 
person’s trouble. Usually what we see on first 
acquaintance are only symptoms. People gener- 
ally postpone seeking advice about their personal 
affairs until they are facing a crisis, and then it is 
their immediate perplexity from which they want 
relief. It bulks so large that often they can think 
of nothing else and emphasize it to the exclusion 
of the real problem. So it is that one of the 
first lessons to be learned about helping other 


WHAT ONE MUST KNOW 45 


people is the importance of looking behind the 
present difficulty for the disturbing cause, of 
diagnosing the adjustment that must be made. 

It is essential, also, to discover the things within 
and without the individual to which he can turn 
for the material he may need in building his life 
anew. This involves learning to know the per- 
sonal characteristics of the man who is in trouble: 
his appearance, his mannerisms, his disposition 
and temperament, his qualities of character, his 
habits and his interests, his ambitions, his desires, 
his talents, his skills, his physical and mental 
capacity. 

It involves learning whether he has any plan for 
meeting his difficulties and what that plan is, and 
how he has met similar problems in the past. 
Likewise is it important to be acquainted with the 
extent and variety of his resources. What are his 
assets? They may be many and varied. When a 
man is suddenly stricken with illness, his most 
valuable resource may be the hospital that his 
taxes or his contributions have been instrumental 
in maintaining. Membership in a civic club was 
one of the assets which a woman used in making 
her adjustment to widowhood. When her hus- 
band died, she found in her efforts to improve 


46 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


living conditions in her neighborhood an interest 
that helped to fill the gap that death had made in 
her life. 

To be informed about a man’s savings and his 
credit, or their absence, may be as important in 
aiding him to solve his problems as information of 
this kind would be in reconstructing a business 
on the verge of a receivership. An individual’s 
friends, his relatives, the members of his immedi- 
ate family, are another valuable asset. 

It was the discovery of a resource in relatives 
that changed entirely the latter course of the 
lives of two old people. They had reached the 
years of feebleness and declining strength, and 
now, alone and apparently friendless, they were 
living sparingly in two rooms, each with an ever- 
growing fear of what might happen to the other 
if he or she were taken first. 

The question was not so much one of the physi- 
cal comforts of life. A home for the aged would 
have been glad to receive them, or it would have 
been possible for them to obtain a stipend upon 
which they could continue to live together, but 
this would not have solved the problem of their 
loneliness. They needed to spend their last days 
among their own kith and kin, and it was rela- 


WHAT ONE MUST KNOW 47 


tives that the social case worker, whom they had 
asked for help, endeavored to find. 

The old people had lost all trace of the other 
members of their family. One clue after another 
was followed, the search leading first away from 
the city and then back to it, until at last, within 
three quarters of an hour’s ride on the street car, 
half a dozen nephews and nieces were found, all 
living in the same neighborhood. 

Years before the old man had violated the 
ancient family custom by which the great Bible 
with its history of births, christenings, marriages, 
and deaths descended to the oldest son. Being the 
youngest, and coveting the privilege that could 
not be his by right, he took it by stealth and dis- 
appeared. Sometime later he went to live with 
one of his sisters. Both broke with the rest of the 
family, and it was not until the social worker was 
called into consultation that they learned that 
they were not alone in the world, but that near 
by there were those to whom they were ‘Uncle 
Sam’ and ‘Aunt Mary,’ and who, the past having 
been forgiven, would gladly welcome them into 
their homes. 

Resources, then, are the assets a man has out- 
side of himself. They may be economic; they 


48 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


may be spiritual; they may be social. They may 
be his employer, his lodge, his church, his rela- 
tives, his bank account, his university, the munici- 
pal employment bureau, the hospital around the 
corner, his building and loan association. Always 
they are among the stanchest of the timbers that 
can be used in helping a person make his adjust- 
ments. 

Along with the knowledge of them must go the 
facts which show the influences bearing imme- 
diately upon the individual’s life. One must ap- 
preciate what might be called his setting. Setting 
may be either a succession of recent events or a 
present environment which is having a direct ef- 
fect upon an individual’s behavior. His family, 
his associates at work, the neighborhood in which 
he lives are all part of his setting. They condition 
his actions just as what we feel and do in the 
evening is affected by what has happened and by 
what we have done during the day. 

It was setting which supplied the clue to the 
unusual behavior of Mrs. Doran. One morning 
a woman of charming personality called to see her. 
The two women had had a friendly acquaintance 
with each other. Nevertheless, no sooner had Mrs. 
Doran caught sight of her visitor than she picked 


WHAT ONE MUST KNOW AQ 


up a vase and hurled it at her, and then, pushing 
her out of the house, slammed the door upon her. 
Considering only the pleasant character of the 
visitor and the previous cordial relations which 
had existed between her and Mrs. Doran, one 
could only conclude that Mrs. Doran was either 
vicious or insane. The possession of additional 
facts gives the incident its true interpretation. 
Mrs. Doran’s husband had tuberculosis. He 
had been away at a sanatorium, but having be- 
come homesick had returned to his family. The 
trip and life in the city had been a serious drain 
upon his health, and Mrs. Doran saw that he was 
steadily losing the strength he had gained in the 
mountains. About this time she learned that the 
older of her two boys had been infected with his 
father’s disease and that it would be necessary for 
him to take the cure. Application was made for 
the admission of Mr. Doran and his son to the 
sanatorium, and Mrs. Doran decided that she 
would insure their staying away until their disease 
was arrested by giving up her home. Her younger 
son, Henry, was sent to live with a family in a 
neighboring suburb and Mrs. Doran made prepa- 
rations to store her furniture as soon as the sana- 
torium could receive the two patients. A month 


5o (THE: ART) OF HELPING PEOPLE 


passed. Twice word was received that there was 
a place for Samuel, the boy who was sick. Each 
time on the very day when he was to leave, and 
after Mrs. Doran had nerved herself to the wrench 
of separation, notice arrived that his departure 
would have to be delayed. Meanwhile, Henry 
seemed to be enjoying his new home so much that 
his mother began to worry lest in the presence of 
greater comforts he would forget his parents and 
his brother. 

On the day that Mrs. Doran’s visitor called, 
Samuel’s trip to the sanatorium had just been 
postponed for the third time. Mr. Doran had 
been venting his own irritation upon his wife and 
had been abusing her so violently that she had 
been obliged to take refuge in the cellar where she 
had spent the night. Morning found her phys- 
ically and nervously exhausted. Her head ached 
and she was worried to distraction. She had 
reached the breaking point. 

At this critical time the caller appeared, and 
with a pleasant smile asked how she was feeling. 
It was the last straw. To see any other human 
being cheerful at that moment was more than 
Mrs. Doran could endure, and she hurled at her 
visitor the first thing upon which she could lay 


WHAT ONE MUST KNOW 51 


hands, an understandable action when we know 
its setting. 

Similarly, our attitude toward the man who 
apparently is listless and uninterested in his work 
changes when we learn that he is having to stay 
up most of the night nursing a sick wife. There 
was a time when truancy was thought to be en- 
tirely due to difficulties innate with the schoolboy, 
difficulties that might be corrected by sending him 
to a special school, but experience has shown that 
often the home from which the child comes is 
chiefly responsible for his trouble. The parents 
may be discouraging him, they may be ill-treating 
him, or they may not be taking enough interest in 
him. In his setting may lie the explanation of his 
truancy. 

Immediate environment and recent events are 
not always enough to enable one to understand 
the man in trouble. Sometimes his difficulty lies 
deeper. Its solution may be determined by his 
early life and training. Facts of this kind which 
have to do with the previous, as contrasted with 
the current history of the individual, social case 
workers call background. 

It was the knowledge of the background of 
George McKloskey which made possible an un- 


52 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


derstanding of his present difficulties and the 
helping of him to make a better adjustment. 

McKloskey was considered to be a failure by all 
who were acquainted with him. He had not suc- 
ceeded in supporting his family. He had never 
held a job for any length of time. He had made no 
friends. He seemed, if anything, to avoid his 
neighbors and his fellow workmen. He com- 
plained frequently of feeling tired and worn out. 
His relatives said that he was lazy, and because 
he was silent, called him ‘‘dummy.’’ Even his 
wife who loved him dearly began to wonder 
whether he was not too easily exhausted and 
whether he ought not to do more for his family. 
Various attempts were made to solve his problem. 
None of them was successful. As soon, however, 
as the background of his life was learned, the way 
out of trouble became clear. 

McKloskey had been born in a small mill town. 
His mother died when he was still little more than 
a baby, and his father, a drinkingman, married a 
woman who had seen the bottom of fully asmany 
glasses as he. The child knew little except hard 
work and abuse. Almost his earliest recollection 
was that of being kicked into the street by his 
father with the command that he beg food of the 
neighbors. 


WHAT ONE MUST KNOW «53 


He had not spent a day in school. At nine 
years he went to the factory that his parents 
might profit by his wages, and there he worked 
long hours until he was sixteen. Then he grew 
weary of the drudgery and hardship of his life and 
the regularity with which his father appropriated 
his pay envelope. He ran away from home and 
came to the city. There he knocked about from 
one job to another. He had barely passed his 
twenty-first birthday when he met the girl whoa 
few months later became his wife. Whatever his 
difficulties in living had been before, they were 
soon accentuated by the responsibilities of a 
family, and life became more and more miserable 
for him and for the household. 

Underlying all his experiences were two great 
emotional facts. He had not gone far past boy- 
hood when he began to suffer from attacks of 
epilepsy. They were not frequent, but they were 
always imminent. Sometimes they seized him at 
work, sometimes on the street. He could never 
tell where or how they would develop. When he 
was in the throes of one, his wife seemed better 
able to take care of him than anybody else, and 
aside from the fear which he had of them at any 
time, he dreaded a visitation in her absence. They 


54 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


left him weak and nervously exhausted, so that he 
had no energy for work. 

But he suffered from even a greater handicap. 
He was illiterate. This was one reason why his 
jobs were so many and so brief. Sooner or later 
a situation would develop which would demand 
an ability to read and he would either be dis- 
charged or he would leave through shame. For he 
was an American of American parentage. If he 
had been of foreign birth, less would have been 
expected of him. He would have expected less of 
himself. Always there was with him this second 
dread, the dread of the discovery that he could 
not read. More than the fear of epilepsy it was 
this which caused him to avoid the company of 
his fellow workmen. It deprived him of the as- 
surance which every man needs in order to make 
new acquaintances. 

It influenced him in his social life. Several 
times he had suffered embarrassing disclosures. 
Once while visiting some friends he was found 
reading a magazine upside down. On another oc- 
casion he had been obliged to confess his inability 
to tell the time, but the most serious of all the un- 
fortunate incidents that developed from his lack 
of education happened in Sunday school. Church 


WHAT ONE MUST KNOW 55 


had been a refuge to him from his troubles. He 
had found solace and self-expression in religion 
and he was rarely absent from services. 

Then one afternoon in Sunday school the 
teacher of the Bible class asked him to read a 
verse of Scripture. McKloskey tried to decline, 
but the more he demurred the more insistent did 
the teacher become in encouraging this appar- 
ently bashful young man. Finally McKloskey left 
his seat and walked out of the room, his face 
ablaze with mortification. That broke his con- 
nection with the church. 

With each new experience, either of this kind 
or of an attack of epilepsy, McKloskey’s fears 
grew stronger, until he lost all confidence in him- 
self. He became ashamed of his appearance, al- 
though his clothes were no worse than those of 
many of his neighbors, and in order to avoid being 
seen he almost never eee his own house by the 
front door. as 

Is it surprising that, with such a background of 
fear and barrenness of opportunity, McKloskey 
should have been shy, that his jobs were short- 
lived, and that he made few friends? Yet 
McKloskey had character; he was not without in- 
itiative; he had a substantial asset in the devo- 


56: THE ART (OF HELPING PEOPLE 


tion of his wife; both he and she had a sense of 
humor which enabled them to laugh at the worst 
of their difficulties; he had a strong and abiding 
interest in work in the soil — ‘the ground is just 
like a fellow to me,’ was how he expressed it. 
When these and other facts appeared, the way in 
which McKloskey could find his niche became 
plain. He needed an environment to which he 
could feel equal and in which he would have a 
sense of security and comfort. This sort of en- 
vironment was found for him in a village of a few 
hundred people from which he could go to work 
on a neighboring truck farm, and where there 
was a simple, friendly atmosphere that after the 
complicated life in the city made him feel imme- 
diately at home. 

As in the helping of McKloskey, so with many 
another person, a knowledge of background may 
be the determining factor in making possible a 
readjustment to life. A man is what he has been. 
He is truly a part of all that he has met and there 
is no better key to his present than that which he 
has thought and experienced in the past. If, in ad- 
dition to knowing a man’s background, we know 
his setting, his resources, and his personal charac- 
teristics, we are close to understanding the man 
himself. 


WHAT ONE MUST KNOW 57 


There can, of course, be no final knowledge of 
human beings and their difficulties, no complete 
acquaintance with them. Seldom are the depths 
of personality plumbed, seldom are all experi- 
ences disclosed. Personal characteristics, a man’s 
plans for himself, resources, setting, and back- 
ground, are merely categories under which one 
can assemble at any given time the facts which he 
possesses about a man. They make possible a 
tentative diagnosis, a diagnosis of the situation as 
it presents itself to-day. To-morrow it may be 
altered by additional facts; for unlike materials 
and machines people are forever changing and 
forever new. 

The great essential in arriving at an apprecia- 
tion of men and women is to remember that all 
information about human beings is relative and 
must ever be subject to revision. Then, and then 
only, are we prepared successfully to apply the 
four categories that have been described, and 
thereby to achieve the knowledge and the under- 
standing of other people which are necessary to 
the helping of them out of trouble. 


CHAPTER V 
SELF-REVELATION 


What is necessary before one can read another’s secret? It is not 
mere curiosity, — we know that shuts up the nature which it 
tries to read. It is not awkward goodwill; that, tco, crushes the 
flower which it tries to examine. 

A man comes with impertinent curiosity and looks into your 
window, and you shut it in his face indignantly. A friend comes 
strolling by and gazes in with easy carelessness, not making much 
of what you may be doing, not thinking it of much importance, 
and before him you cover up instinctively the work which was 
serious to you and make believe you were playing games. 

When men try to get hold of the secret of your life, no friend- 
ship, no kindliness, can make you show it to them unless they 
evidently really feel as you feel that it is a serious and a sacred 
thing. There must be something like reverence or awe about the 
way that they approach you. (Sermons of Phillips Brooks.) 


THE task even of approximating a knowledge of 
other people would be impossible were it not for 
the fundamental need which every human being 
has for self-revelation. If this is true when the 
course of life is clear and undisturbed, it is most 
assuredly true when a man is in difficulty. Then 
reticence requires an almost conscious effort and 
confession is often a necessity. There are times 
when the urge to unburden one’s self will not be 
denied and one is compelled to speak. 

The experience that befell a social worker 
while on a train returning from the seashore is by 


SELF-REVELATION 59 


no means uncommon. A shift in the crowd which 
filled the aisle of the car — it was the evening of 
the Fourth of July — placed him opposite a young 
man who had come on board at the last stop. 
The man might possibly have been a mechanic, 
Plainly he was a sturdy, hard-working, self- 
respecting fellow, not at all the kind of person to 
air his affairs in public. He asked the social 
worker when they were due at the terminal and 
the latter in reply brought forth his time-table. 
A few minutes later a question about hotels was 
asked, and answered. 

. Beyond this there was no conversation. After 
a quarter of an hour the train approached its des- 
tination and the social worker began edging his 
way toward the platform. The young man fol- 
lowed him, and, as they reached the steps said 
with a sigh: 

“Well, I’m feeling mighty blue to-night.” 

“That’s too bad,” the social worker replied. 
*“This isn’t a day on which to feel blue.”’ 

There was a pause for a moment or two. The 
train had slowed almost to a stop. Then, the 
young man continued: 

‘“‘T’ve just said good-bye to the best friend I 
have on earth.” 


60 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


‘‘Oh, I’m sorry,” his companion responded. 
HL TESOLLY, » | 

They left the car and started walking down the 
platform together. 

‘I’m as much in love with her now as when I 
married her,’ the first man remarked; and he 
began to tell his story. For an hour and a half 
these two, who until that evening had been 
strangers to each other, remained in the station 
while the unhappy husband disclosed the things 
that were troubling him, many of them of the 
most intimate character. 

He had just left this wife who, he discovered, 
had been unfaithful to him. The whole tragedy 
was recent and vivid in his mind and the com- 
pulsion to tell was stronger than his natural reti- 
cence. The social worker was the first person to 
whom he happened to speak after leaving home, 
and to him, therefore, he revealed his distress. 

As with this man, so with many people, inhibi- 
tions are weakest immediately after an emotional 
experience. It is then that such persons are most 
likely to tell what is upon their minds. With oth- 
ers the desire to tell is cumulative in its urgency, 
until at length they can hold their secrets no 
longer. 


SELF-REVELATION 61 


It is, indeed, the unusual man who is able to 
resist the desire to unburden himself, and fre- 
quently the price of resistance is a miserable and 
an embittered personality. People want to tell. 
When they hesitate, it is only because they wish 
to be certain that they have found an individual 
in whom with security they can confide. And by 
security they mean, not merely safety from a 
repetition to others of what they have told, or the 
assurance of action that can be taken to help 
them, but also the far greater security that comes 
from the knowledge that they are understood, for 
people seem almost instinctively to believe, and 
rightly, that the individual who understands 
them will guard their secrets and will be able to 
advise them. 

Whatever success a man has in learning to 
know those whom he is called upon to help rests 
largely upon whether or not they see in him this 
capacity to understand. It is the surest introduc- 
tion to confidences. The person who would 
possess it must have a fundamental respect for 
other people. He must feel the unique importance 
of each individual who approaches him and he 
must have a faith in human nature that is founded, 
not upon a sheltered optimism, but upon a know- 


62’ THE ART OF HELPING, PEOPLE 


ledge of the facts. ‘‘ Diogenes,” says Chesterton, 
‘‘looked for his honest man inside every crypt and 
cavern; but he never thought of looking inside 
the thief.’’ He who would receive the confession 
of another man must see honesty in the thief 
without being blind to his thievery. He must feel 
neither surprise nor horror at any revelation that 
may be made to him, no matter how unusual. It 
is not enough to be silent and to refrain from ex- 
pressing these emotions. They must not even 
exist. 

He must be impersonal. He must not judge. 
His attitude toward the person who has revealed 
himself must not change from what it was before 
the secret was disclosed. ‘‘I told you,”’ explained 
one woman who had confided to another woman 
certain things about herself unknown even to her 
husband, ‘‘because I knew that it would not 
make any difference.’ It is the capacity to hear 
the worst or the best in human nature and to ac- 
cept it neither as worst nor as best, but as life, 
which is the supreme test of him who would be- 
come the confidant of his fellows. 

This is by no means an unapproachable ideal. 
Granted that one has faith in human beings anda 
liking for them, he can cultivate understanding as 


SELF—-REVELATION 63 


he would cultivate any other attitude of mind. It 
is largely the outgrowth of an enlightened ex- 
perience in dealing with people in trouble. The 
man whose first response to abnormalities in the 
conduct of his neighbor is — “‘I won’t have any- 
thing to do with him. His actions are outrageous. 
He’s no good. He doesn’t amount to anything”’ 
— soon finds his ideas changing when he is faced 
with the necessity of helping the person of whose 
behavior he does not approve. Then the conduct 
which aroused his anger or his disgust becomes a 
problem to be solved. The more unusual the be- 
havior, the greater he finds the challenge to his 
ability. He seeks more and more for causes and 
solutions and, in doing so, obliterates his old 
prejudices and preconceptions. He begins to ap- 
preciate some of the handicaps under which 
human beings less fortunately placed than him- 
self live; and thus gradually he acquires the atti- 
tude and point. of view that those in need of help 
seek in selecting a person to whom to tell their 
secrets. 

Character and personality are not the only 
introduction to confidences, nor are they alone 
always enough to encourage self-revelation. Cir- 
cumstance plays an important part in causing 


64 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


people to tell their secrets, and sometimes seem- 
ingly superficial things indicate to people the sort 
of person who will understand them. 

The mere fact that a man is a physician or a 
social case worker is to many people a guarantee, 
not simply that they can expect competence and 
helpfulness, but that they will receive a sym- 
pathetic hearing. Certainly no one is entrusted 
with more secrets than those who follow these 
two callings. With what difficulty does a physi- 
cian achieve a vacation. Let it be known that his 
profession is medicine and the most casual con- 
versation will develop into a revelation of the in- 
timate facts about the life of his vis-a-vis. Sim- 
ilarly the social case worker usually accepts 
rather than solicits the confidences of those in 
trouble. The men and the women to whom other 
men and women may reveal themselves are so few 
that he whose position or training gives promise 
of insight and an open mind is singled out for this 
service. 

Of all the circumstances which are taken to in- 
dicate the capacity to understand, perhaps the 
most common is a kinship in experience. One 
mother will tell another mother what she would be 
slow to confide to an unmarried person. Mem- 


SELF—-REVELATION 65 


bers of the same profession, those who have suf- 
fered a similar bereavement, men who have faced 
danger together, have a sense of mutual apprecia- 
tion that helps them to unburden themselves. 
How often has one person been heard to say of 
another, ‘‘He’s been through it; he knows.”’ 

Frequently it is helpful to match what the 
person in trouble is revealing with a revelation of 
something in one’s own life. It reassures the man 
in trouble to learn that the handicap or the diff- 
culty which he had thought to be unusual is 
familiar to others, and that the person who is lis- 
tening to his story has faced a similar problem. 
There is a value in the mere sharing of experiences. 
It gives a person a sense of security to find that 
his confidant is ready to give of himself as well as 
to take. 

Next, perhaps, to this kinship in experience as 
a means of helping people to reveal themselves is 
a kinship in interests. cf 

A social case worker had been called upon for 
advice about the apparent incompatibility of a 
husband and wife. Both were Armenians. The 
woman who had been deserted by the man ac- 
cused him of neglect, abuse, and non-support. 
Her relatives endorsed all she said. 


66 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


It was important that the social worker should f 
learn the man’s side of the story. Accordingly 
she called at the home of a friend of his, also an 
Armenian. 

‘“‘T have come to see you,”’ she explained to the 
woman who answered her ring, “‘because I am 
trying to help some friends of yours, Mr. Terian 
and his wife.” 

Instantly a mask seemed to fall down over the 
face of the woman. 

‘‘T know nothing,” she replied. 

It was winter-time and the weather was raw, 
and so the social worker stepped into the hall 
saying, “It’s a cold day. May I come in for a few 
minutes?”’ 

Mrs. Demoyan took her visitor into the living- 
room. 

After the two women were seated, the visitor 
began, ‘‘ You’re an Armenian, aren’t you? I have 
been so interested in Armenia because it has had 
such a terrible struggle. How long did you live 
there?”’ 

Simple and obvious though this introduction 
was, it immediately brought a response. The sub- 
ject was of the greatest consequence to Mrs. 
Demoyan, and she began talking about her life in 
Armenia. 


SELF-REVELATION 67 


“They have different customs about marriage 
over there, haven’t they?”’ the visitor suggested 
after a while. 

Mrs. Demoyan replied by saying that she had 
not known her husband until the day before she 
was married. She added that Mr. and Mrs. 
Terian had met each other only five days before 
their wedding. 

A more desirable approach to the purpose of the 
interview could not have been found. In a very 
few minutes Mrs. Demoyan had told Mr. Terian’s 
story and had promised to send him to call upon 
the social worker in order that he might talk with 
her about his marital difficulties. 

Interests are inherently seductive. It is almost 
impossible to refrain from talking about them 
once they are suggested, and, as with Mrs. 
Demoyan, the transition from the impersonal to 
the more intimate interest takes place almost un- 
consciously. This is particularly true of the use 
of reminiscence as a means of learning to know 
elderly people. The past which they enjoy de- 
scribing supplies the very background that is es- 
sential to him who is trying to understand their 
problems, and at the same time serves as an in- 
troduction to the other facts which it may be 
necessary to obtain. 


68 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


There is a value in conversation upon subjects 
other than the one of immediate importance. It 
gives the man in need of help an opportunity to 
become acquainted with the personality of the 
individual who desires to aid him. While this 
can be carried to the point at which it becomes a 
waste of time, there is often no other way of con- 
veying to a person the assurance that here is one 
with whom he can feel safe. This applies also to 
doing things together. A lunch, a talk across a 
restaurant table, an afternoon stroll, may bring 
forth secrets that no interview in an office could 
produce. Again and again, the boy or the girl 
whose reticence has resisted all efforts at conver- 
sation has been helped to self-revelation by the 
influence of an afternoon in a moving-picture 
show or a ride on a motor-bus. 

There is about the doing of things together 
something which takes from a man the conscious- 
ness of being observed. Many people, no matter 
how much confidence they may place in the person 
to whom they are talking, prefer not to have him 
looking into their faces while they speak. To 
know that he is being noticed reminds a man of 
himself and makes him self-conscious. If he is 
seated by the side of his confidant instead of 


SELF-REVELATION 69 


opposite, this sense of being watched does not 
become so strong. The idea that an individual is 
more likely to reveal his secrets when he is in 
the shadow than when he is in the full glare of 
light is not without its foundation in experi- 
ence. We want to tell our secrets unobserved 
even by the person to whom they are being re- 
vealed. 

Far more important than this in aiding an in- 
dividual to unburden himself is the demonstration 
of a friendly interest in him. It wassuch a demon- 
stration which caused a young unmarried mother 
to talk to a social case worker about the father of 
her baby when she had been unable to discuss it 
with any one else. Instead of seeking an interview 
upon this subject, the social worker had written 
a note to the girl asking whether she would not 
like to enter night school. She knew that the 
young woman was anxious to learn bookkeeping. 
When the girl arrived, the conversation was first 
directed to her new job. She had just obtained a 
position which gave her an opportunity to work 
with figures and which greatly pleased and in- 
terested her. The question of further training in 
business was discussed, and plans were made for 
her admission to an evening high school. Not 


70 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


until then did the social worker venture upon the 
real subject of the interview. 

“Do you feel like talking about Walter, now, 
Nina?’’ she asked. Walter was the name of the 
father of the baby. 

The girl began to cry. She had kept her troubles 
to herself for so long a time, she said, that she 
had become hopeless. She was relieved to be able 
to speak about her anxieties. Secure in the friendly 
interest of the social worker, she told her story. 

Sometimes so gradual an approach to the facts 
is unnecessary and it is possible to go directly to 
the heart of the trouble. 

Two friends who had not seen each other for 
more than a year chanced to meet on the street. 

‘‘How have things been going?”’ asked the first. 

‘Fairly well,’’ was the somewhat doubtful 
reply, and the first speaker, observing a cloudi- 
ness about the usually clear and alert glance of his 
friend, went straight to that which he desired to 
know. 

“Jim,” he said, with concern, ‘“‘are you 
worried?”’ 

Jim was worried. His friend had opened the 
door to his story and he laid bare his anxieties. 

Even more interesting was the opening ques- 


SELF-REVELATION 71 


tion of a physician who was being consulted by an 
extremely nervous person. She was so excited 
when she entered his office that she was visibly 
trembling. The doctor saw his opportunity. 

‘‘Are you always as nervous as this?’”’ he asked. 
Nothing could have been better planned to relieve 
the patient. By recognizing her difficulty instead 
of appearing to ignore it, he placed her at once in 
a free state of mind and soon she was telling him 
about herself. 

The manner in which this first approach is made 
to the individual in difficulty frequently deter- 
mines the success of the interview. This is illus- 
trated by the different ways in which two persons 
set about helping an ex-soldier out of trouble. 
The soldier had been discharged from a hospital 
which reported: ‘There is nothing wrong with the 
man physically. He seems to be worried about 
something. Possibly he may be having trouble 
with his wife.” 

A young man, a novice in social case work called 
to see him. Having in mind the statement from 
the hospital, his greeting to the patient was: 
‘“The doctor says you seem to be worried about 
something. Are you having trouble with your 
wife?”’ 


72 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


The soldier, of course, assured the young man 
that he had not a worry in all the world and that 
his wife was a great comfort and help to him. 
More than this he would not say, and in despair 
the young man asked a social worker of maturity 
and experience to see what she could accom- 
plish. 

On entering the room, she noticed beside the 
bed a tray with the breakfast upon it untouched. 
The soldier lay partly propped by pillows. Tears 
were rolling down his cheeks. 

‘‘Not very hungry this morning,” the visitor 
began, looking at the tray. 

The soldier shook his head, but made no reply. 

‘Well, it’s hard to eat when you’re not feeling 
just right,’’ continued the woman. ‘“‘Were you 
able to eat any supper last night?”’ 

‘‘Not much,’ the soldier replied. 

‘‘T’m not surprised,’’ said the visitor. ‘‘Most 
men don’t like to take their meals in bed. Why 
don’t you ask the landlady to put the tray on the 
table over there?’’ — pointing across the room. 
‘Then you could sit up. It would give you more 
of an appetite.” 

“‘T couldn’t,’’ replied the man; “‘I’d be afraid.” 

‘I know,” said the social worker understand- 


SELF—-REVELATION 73 


ingly; ‘‘you’d feel as if you were going to topple 
over any minute.” 

be eSot 

“Especially out on the street, when you’re 
alone. I’ve had the same feeling myself.” 

‘When you were waiting for the trolley car?”’ 
inquired the soldier. 

‘‘Yes,’’ answered the social worker, who it hap- 
pened had had a nervous breakdown. ‘‘I used to 
feel as if I were going to drop. I used to have all 
sorts of queer feelings.” 

The soldier showed that he was interested. 
The tears had stopped. 

‘“What did you do?” 

‘‘Just grit my teeth and kept on waiting until 
the car came.” 

‘‘What happened?” 
' “Nothing. After I had stuck it out for a while, 
the feeling didn’t come back.’”’ Then, taking a 
turn at questioning, “ Do you find it worse in the 
morning or at night?”’ 

‘“‘Won’t you sit down?”’ the soldier interrupted 
with a nod toward the chair near the foot of the 
bed. ‘‘It’s worse in the afternoon, I always feel 
weaker then. I guess I get tired by the work at the 
vocational school. I always feel faint.”’ 


74 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


“‘Perhaps you haven’t been eating enough for 
lunch. That’s a poor way of economizing — un- 
less one has to,”’ suggested the social worker. 

““My Government allowance hasn’t been com- 
ing regularly,” explained the soldier. 

Allotments and allowances during and after the 
war were a subject of interest to every soldier. In 
answer to a few questions, but largely without 
suggestion, the young man told when the pay- 
ments had stopped, how much he had received, 
how long he had been sick, and when he had been 
disabled. 

‘“‘So you see, I haven’t always been able to af- 
ford lunch,’’ he concluded. 

‘““That’s probably a good part of your trouble,”’ 
the social worker replied. “‘Three hearty meals a 
day would make you feel differently. I'll have the 
landlady send up some hot coffee — I’m afraid 
this is cold — and some toast. And I'll have her 
arrange a good lunch and dinner for you. Then 
you'll feel more like yourself. To-morrow you 
come and see me and we'll try to do something 
about your compensation.” 

The next morning the soldier appeared at her 
office. The talk had been enough to enable him to 
master, at least for a time, the neurosis from 


SELF-REVELATION 75 


which he was suffering. Of his own accord, in con- 
nection with the plans for obtaining compensa- 
tion, he remarked that he was sorry not to be able 
to send money home, and then the fact that he 
was worried about not being able to support his 
wife was disclosed, as well as many another fact 
about himself. Building on this knowledge, the 
social worker was able to help the soldier to make 
the adjustments that restored him to health and 
family. 

So it is with most people in difficulty. They 
want to tell about the things which are worrying 
them, and if they are only approached in the right 
way they will disclose their secrets. Trouble seals 
the lips of few. Usually it compels revelation. 
Human beings must share their lives with others. 
Joy is too exquisite, sorrow too bitter, to be en- 
dured alone. 

“‘T remember a man,” wrote Mrs. Piozzi in her 
** British Synonymy,” ‘“‘much delighted in by the 
upper ranks of society in London some twenty 
years ago, who, upon a trifling embarrassment in 
his pecuniary affairs, hanged himself behind the 
stable door, to the astonishment of all who knew 
him as the liveliest companion and most agreeable 
converser breathing. ‘What upon earth,’ said one 


76 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 
hang him- 





at our house, ‘could have made 
self?’ ‘Why, just his having a multitude of ac- 
quaintance,’ replied Dr. Johnson, ‘and ne’er a 
friend.’”’ 

Most people want to unburden themselves of 
the things that are troubling them. The person 
in difficulty may share his secret in part here and 
in part there, or he may select some one to whom 
he reveals the whole story. In one way or another 
he will seek to relieve himself of the load he has 
been carrying. All he asks is that his confidant be 
a person who will understand him and with whom 
he can feel secure. 


CHAR TERAVI 
THE SOURCES OF UNDERSTANDING 


Sometimes we speak as if each of us were a single individual, 
standing solitary, existing alone; but nothing of the sort is true. 
The smallest conceivable personality is threefold, — father, 
mother, child. No one of us starts as an individual or can ever 
after become such, being essentially social, a member merely, a 
part of a larger whole. (GEORGE HERBERT PALMER in his Life of 
Alice Freeman Palmer.) 


No matter how fully and freely an individual may 
reveal his secrets, he is not likely to be able to 
present himself as he is. He may describe his 
thoughts and his feelings, but he can hardly hope 
accurately to evaluate his capacities and his char- 
acteristics, or to appreciate the force of the various 
influences that are playing upon him. He may 
consider himself to have certain abilities, while his 
employer would estimate his talents quite differ- 
ently. His relations with his church or with his 
family might show him to be almost another 
person from the individual he thinks himself to be, 
while employer, clergyman, and family would 
differ from one another in the pictures they would 
draw of him. 

To approach an understanding of an individual 
and his problems one must view him from as many 


73) THE ART SOR VIR ORIN GAPE GEE 


as possible of the major relationships of his life. 
The chief of these is usually the home. It is here 
that again and again the answer will be found to 
many of the difficulties in which a person finds 
himself. It was in the home that the handicaps 
which were affecting the adjustment of Martha, 
the little girl who was silent in school (described in 
Chapter II), arose, and it was in the home that 
the solution of the trouble of Mark Sullivan lay. 

He had been one of the first men to be dis- 
charged when, under the stress of an industrial de- 
pression, the F. & M. Company began reducing 
its force. At one time he had been a capable and 
an efficient workman, but during more than a 
year he had been steadily deteriorating. He was 
sluggish and dull in the performance of his tasks, 
and he was almost never prompt in arriving at 
the shop in the morning. It was not surprising 
that he should have been dismissed. 

The social case worker whom Sullivan consulted 
called at his home. She found it in disarray and 
confusion. Mrs. Sullivan evidently was a poor 
housekeeper. It developed that the meals were 
seldom ready on time and that frequently her 
husband had been obliged to prepare his break- 
fast in the morning, pack his lunch, and assume 


SOURCES OF UNDERSTANDING 79 


the responsibility for the appearance of dinner on 
the table at night. No wonder his effectiveness as 
a workman had been impaired. 

One source of difficulty seemed to be Mrs. 
Sullivan’s health. A physician was consulted. 
His diagnosis pointed to the need of an operation. 
It was performed, but, although Mrs. Sullivan’s 
general condition showed an improvement, she 
continued to be as listless and as delicate as be- 
fore. 

Then the social worker became acquainted with 
Mrs. Sullivan’s mother who made her home there. 
She was an elderly woman, too feeble to be of any 
assistance in the housekeeping, but not too weak 
to have a most unfortunate influence upon Mrs. 
Sullivan. She was one of those people who de- 
light in the discussion of symptoms and who take 
pleasure in anticipating the worst possible event 
when any crisis is at hand. It was this character- 
istic which, with the best of intentions, she had 
applied to her daughter’s state of health. Did 
Mrs. Sullivan develop the slightest suggestion of 
a cold, her mother was sure to remark that this 
was just the most undesirable time of the year to 
have anything the matter with one; there was so 
much influenza, or there was so much pneumonia, 


80 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


or there was so much of some other kind of dis- 
ease about. A slight loss of color, or quite as read- 
ily, a slight heightening of color, would remind 
the old lady of the way in which the woman next 
door had begun to go down hill the winter she 
died of tuberculosis. A stomach ache suggested 
cancer. A headache always contained the possi- 
bility of mastoiditis. There was scarcely any 
change in the bodily condition of Mrs. Sullivan 
which did not bring to her mother the message of 
serious illness. 

In such an environment it would truly have 
been a strong will that could have resisted the 
temptation to be delicate. It was suggested, 
therefore, that a place in a home for the aged be 
found for Mrs. Sullivan’s mother. This advice 
was followed, and Mrs. Sullivan, freed from the 
ever-present suggestion of ill-health, began to take 
an interest in other things. She regained her 
strength. Her housekeeping correspondingly 1im- 
proved, and her husband was able successfully to 
meet the requirements of the new job which he 
had obtained. Neither Mr. Sullivan nor Mrs. 
Sullivan had sensed the cause of their trouble, and 
the social worker herself had not discovered it un- 
til she had become intimately acquainted with 


SOURCES OF UNDERSTANDING 81 


the life of the family. The key to the problem lay 
there. 

Many similar experiences might be cited as 
testimony to the importance of the home and the 
people living in it as a means of developing an 
understanding of an individual and his adjust- 
ments. It is toward the home and the family that 
the earliest steps — usually the first — should be 
taken in seeking an acquaintance with the person 
in trouble. 

Our efforts should not end there. A man’s 
other associates should be consulted. The im- 
portance of this is illustrated by the unsuccessful 
way in which at first the predicament of Esther 
Hansen was approached and the method by which 
later an understanding of her difficulty was ob- 
tained. 

Miss Hansen had asked the father of one of her 
former schoolmates to lend her three hundred 
dollars. She was the only support of her parents, 
both well advanced in years, and of an invalid 
sister. At a time when houses were difficult to 
rent, she had been compelled to buy her home or 
lose it, and now the problem of meeting the in- 
terest upon the mortgage had become too great. 
She had no negotiable assets and no one among her 


82): THE ART OF HELPING ‘PEOPLE 


immediate acquaintance to whom she could turn. 
Very shortly her salary would be increased and 
the margin which this would yield would enable 
her to clear her debt in two years. 

The presence of the woman, her evident cul- 
ture, and her anxiety impressed the man. He sent 
a representative to visit her at her home. Here 
Miss Hansen made a further explanation of her 
financial worries. Her parents and her sister and 
the appearance of the household seemed to sub- 
stantiate her story, and the loan was made. 

After two years Miss Hansen asked the man 
for a second loan, although she had repaid only a 
few dollars of the first. A social worker who was 
consulted decided to talk with those with whom 
Miss Hansen was associated. The woman was 
the breadwinner of her family. She had numerous 
relatives. She was the patient of a physician. She 
was a governess. She was a subscription agent for 
a periodical. She had borrowed money from a 
loan office. 

The loan office told a story of money advanced 
and not repaid. The circulation manager had 
been greatly annoyed by the complaints he was 
constantly receiving from persons who had sub- 
scribed through her for his magazine and then had 


SOURCES OF UNDERSTANDING 83 


received no copies. She had given him neither 
their money nor their names. The family where 
Miss Hansen had been employed as a governess 
reported that she had been away on sick-leave for 
nearly six months, and even when working she 
would often appear in the morning and then not 
return in the afternoon. She was frequently ab- 
sent without giving any advance notification. 
The substitute governess said that she had been 
obliged to go over again with the children what- 
ever ground Miss Hansen was supposed to have 
covered, for they had learned absolutely nothing. 
Her physician stated that he had felt justified in 
defining her trouble as “‘nervous exhaustion.’ 
From the first time he had seen her three years 
ago, she had been erratic and often irrational. 
He ascribed her condition to her personal diffi- 
culties. She was highly nervous and had a tend- 
ency toward hysteria and melancholia. | 

A visit to Miss Hansen’s home had previously 
disclosed the fact that her mother had died a few 
months before without having had a physician 
called. The house had fallen into a state of the 
wildest disorder and filth. The family possessions 
were strewn about miscellaneously. Mr. Hansen 
was a refined but impractical sort of man, well 


84 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


advanced in years, who seemed to be utterly in- 
capable of grappling with the situation. From 
what he said — and this was later confirmed by 
the relatives— Miss Hansen’s mother had been 
of unsound mind. The invalid sister had never 
developed fully either physically or mentally. 

The social worker now persuaded Miss Hansen 
to visit a psychiatrist, who reported that she was 
suffering from a manic-depressive form of mental 
disease in which in all likelihood heredity was a 
factor, and that probably her mental abnormality 
had been progressing slowly and steadily. 

The relatives who were consulted said that they 
had been puzzled about Miss Hansen and were 
deeply interested in her. She had never taken 
them into her confidence, although she had often 
asked them for money and had always received 
what she requested. One of the relatives was a 
lawyer. He immediately offered to take charge of 
her legal affairs, which were exceedingly involved. 
He and the other members of the family were 
eager and willing to help her and her family 

Each of the persons who had been associated 
with Miss Hansen knew only his or her part of the 
story and was ignorant of the other aspects of her 
life. Miss Hansen herself had never realized what 


SOURCES OF UNDERSTANDING | 85 


her financial condition was. She said she had 
never had the courage to ‘face herself.’ Nobody, 
in short, knew the perplexed woman and her 
difficulties until the social worker, by talking to 
every one concerned, brought the isolated facts 
into a connected whole. Had this been done pre- 
viously, Miss Hansen might have avoided much 
anxiety and a vast collection of petty debts. The 
children might have been spared her ineffective 
teaching, and the relatives might have been 
rallied immediately to the support and supervision 
of the household until the time when the two 
sisters could be admitted to an institution for 
chronic mental diseases. 

The people who were consulted about Miss 
Hansen occupied a variety of relationships 
toward her. There were, for example, her phy- 
sician and the psychiatrist who made possible a 
better understanding of her mental and nervous 
condition. Almost-everybody has among his as- 
sociates some one who stands in a professional 
relationship to him. Most of us if asked about our 
health could suggest a doctor who would answer 
this question better than we could. The same 
thing would be true of our legal affairs, of our re- 
lationship to the church, and, with children, of 


86 THE ART OF GHECPING (PEOPLE 


their relationship to school. As with Miss Hansen, 
so with many other people, it will be found helpful 
to turn for advice to one or more or all of those 
who occupy what might be called a professional 
relationship to the person in trouble. 

Closely allied to them are his associates in 
business. With Miss Hansen this meant the 
woman who employed her as governess, the loan 
office, and the circulation manager of the maga- 
zine for which she had been selling subscriptions. 
With another person a different group of people 
might be consulted, but usually it will be wise to 
include those who can interpret the vocational 
and the economic sides of an individual’s life. 

Even more important are a man’s personal re- 
lationships, not only his immediate family, but 
his relatives and his friends. The relatives of Miss 
Hansen helped both by contributing to the social 
worker’s appreciation of the woman’s problem 
and by assisting in its solution. Sometimes our 
friends know us more intimately than our kin and 
are better able to advise us. 

There is another source of understanding which 
in this particular situation it was not necessary to 
use but which frequently becomes helpful, namely, 
documents — marriage certificates, burial per- 


SOURCES OF UNDERSTANDING 87 


mits, wills, birth records, deeds of sale. Again and 
again, when human beings have failed to supply 
the explanation, the written page has pointed the 
way to an understanding of an individual. The 
verification or the non-verification of a marriage 
may contain the explanation of much that before 
had not been appreciated, and many a human mys- 
tery has been revealed in the ponderous phrase- 
ology of a mortgage or the forgotten pages of a 
will. 

It was Miss Hansen herself who told the social 
worker what persons were touching her life, and she 
did this in the first interviews that the two women 
had together. Obviously the earlier one learns 
about the professional, personal, and business 
relations of an individual in trouble, the sooner 
one will be able to help him. Miss Hansen eagerly 
assented to the suggestion that the social worker 
make the acquaintance of her associates and see 
what advice and help they might give. She had 
confidence in the social worker and understood 
the point of view from which her difficulty would 
be considered. Both of these things are important. 
We must always remember that we are acting for 
the person in trouble and that the task is far more 
delicate, far more complicated than a mere gather- 


88: THE ART OF ‘HELPING ‘PEOPLE 


ing of information. One consults other people in 
order to obtain their advice, in order to learn how 
they can be of help to the man in difficulty, in 
order to obtain their position upon the question 
which is moot, and in order to present the point 
of view of the individual in trouble. It is out of 
this manifold service, this entrance into the in- 
terplay of relationships that an understanding 
of the man, of the nature of his adjustment and 
the circumstances accompanying it is gradually 
obtained. Let the person in trouble appreciate 
this attitude in the person who is helping him 
and he will forward every effort toward com- 
munication with those with whom he has been 
associated. 

The friend who seeks to advise a friend has at 
the outset the advantage of acquaintance and is 
spared many a step that the stranger must take, 
but whether friend or stranger, this method of 
learning to know a man through his family, and 
through those who stand in a personal, profes- 
sional, or business relationship to him will be 
found to be applicable and essential. Sooner or 
later if one desires to help wisely he will want to 
consult those whose privilege and right it is to be 
consulted, and who may both aid in making a 


SOURCES OF UNDERSTANDING 89 


way out of difficulty — and in developing that 
understanding of the man in trouble — which, 
coupled with his own revelation of himself, is es- 
sential to the solution of his problems. 


CHAPTER VII 
FACING THE FACTS 


Thus they went on till they came to about the middle of the 
Valley, and then Christiana said, ‘‘Methinks I see something 
yonder upon the road before us, a thing of such a shape such as I 
have not seen.’’ Then said Joseph, ‘‘ Mother, what is it?” ‘‘An 
ugly thing, child; an ugly thing,” said she. ‘‘But, mother, what 
is it like?’’ said he. ‘‘It is like I cannot tell what,’’ said she. And 
now it was but a little way off; then said she, ‘‘It is nigh.” 
‘“Well, well,’’ said Mr. Great-heart. ‘‘Let them that are most 
afraid keep close to me.”’ So the fiend came on, and the conductor 
met it; but when it was just come to him, it vanished to all their 
sights. (JOHN BuNYAN, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Second Part.) 


THE surest way of overcoming trouble is to face 
it, squarely and without evasion, is to appreciate 
what it involves, to recognize it as it is. The 
worse the predicament, the more perplexing and 
disturbing, and the more one dreads it, the more 
important is it that one should reduce it to its 
elements, that one should analyze and evaluate it. 
It is the uncertainties, the unknown, the things 
we do not comprehend, that cause the greatest 
anxieties. The first step in extricating one’s self 
from difficulty is to determine precisely what the 
nature of the difficulty is. 

Not everybody succeeds always in doing this. 
As we draw closer to an understanding of the in- 


FACING THE FACTS gl 


dividual in trouble, through the processes de- 
scribed in the preceding chapters, we realize how 
often there is justification for that homely 
diagnosis, ‘‘he doesn’t know what he’s up 
against.” 

Many people have not enough knowledge of life 
and of men to grasp the meaning of the events and 
relationships which are affecting them. They 
need an interpreter. Indeed, the degree of success 
or failure with which an individual passes through 
an experience can almost be determined by the 
quality and the manner of his preparation for it. 
This is illustrated by the way in which two girls 
met a peculiarly difficult situation. Both were 
fourteen years of age, the daughters of widows. 
Both widows were about to be confined, and in 
each instance the baby would be born out of wed- 
lock. 

Esther Boardman went to stay with relatives 
some time before her mother entered the hospital. 
The words with which the child was welcomed 
became the text of the conversation during her 
visit. 

‘This is terrible. We are all disgraced. Your 
mother isa bad woman. We’re so sorry for you.” 

Now, whatever distress the relatives may have 


g2) ‘THE ART OBR HELEINGIPEOPLE 


felt, their attitude showed a complete failure to 
deal with actuality. The baby that was about to 
be born was a fact which no amount of indigna- 
tion could obviate. No matter what the woman 
had done, she was still Esther’s mother, and the 
girl would be obliged soon to return to a daily and 
intimate association with her. 

All this the relatives failed to appreciate, and 
instead of clarifying the situation they only be- 
clouded it with prejudice and rancor, so that when 
Esther came home she could not tolerate either 
her mother or the baby. Not for months was she 
able to reconcile herself to what had happened, 
and it was only after the death of her little sister 
a year later that her affection for her mother once 
more expressed itself. 

The second girl, Mary Culvert, happened to 
spend the period preceding and during her 
mother’s confinement in the home of a woman of 
rare understanding and discernment. Both in her 
attitude and in what she said this woman tried to 
help Mary to face the situation as it was. 

“The baby will need you more than most 
babies would,” she explained. ‘“‘It won’t have a 
father as you had when you were little.’’ She 
spoke of the difficulties confronting the mother 


FACING THE FACTS 93 


and how she would want the affection of her 
daughter. There would probably be criticism. It 
was the more important that Mary should show 
her mother that no matter what had happened 
she loved her. 

What the woman said helped the girl to appre- 
ciate the situation. When she returned home, she 
exhibited a loyalty to her mother and the baby 
that was only increased by the unpleasantness of 
the neighbors, and the difficulty which might 
have been a means of separating daughter from 
mother became a bond that drew them closer to- 
gether. 

While in the helping of people out of trouble it 
can never be said with assurance that any single 
cause has effected any given result, certainly it 
was more than a coincidence that in these two 
histories success should have followed a facing of 
the facts, and failure a refusal to recognize them. 

Various factors entered into the preparation of 
the second girl for her experience, perhaps the 
most important of which was that accompanying 
the explanation of her problem was the descrip- 
tion of her mother’s need of sympathy and sup- 
port. There was an appeal to the child’s instinct 
to defend and to protect. _ 


94. THE ART OBR HELPING PEOPLE 


Seldom are the elements in a situation so simple 
that the bare statement of them is sufficient to 
enable an individual to face them. Usually much 
depends upon the manner in which they are re- 
vealed. The issue may be determined, as here, by 
the mood in which the facts are presented or, as 
with Mrs. Gordon, by the way in which they are 
ordered and arranged. 

Mrs. Gordon had been deserted by her husband. 
Having followed him to the place where he was 
now living, she had had several unsatisfactory in- 
terviews with him. He had been indifferent and 
evasive. A social worker sought in vain for a 
basis upon which the family might be reunited. 
Mr. Gordon was not to be moved. He regarded 
his separation from his wife as permanent and his 
actions more than supported his words. 

Inasmuch as the family could not be re- 
established, it was important that Mrs. Gordon 
should recognize this and begin making the neces- 
sary adjustments. For months she had been 
living a kind of tentative existence, all her plans 
being unsettled by the possibility, ever present in 
her own mind, that her husband might rejoin her. 
The children had now reached an age at which, for 
the sake of their education, a degree of perma- 


PACING THE PACTS 95 


nence in residence was necessary, and they needed 
interests to take the place of those which under 
ordinary circumstances their father would have 
supplied. For their sakes as well as for her own, 
Mrs. Gordon needed to perceive the situation 
with which she was confronted. 

The social worker set about helping her to do 
this in an interview which Mrs. Gordon began by 
saying that she was at a loss to account for her 
husband’s behavior. For two years he had not 
supported his family. During a large part of this 
time, to be sure, he had had difficulty in obtaining 
work, but still he had not even written to her. 
Her friends felt that there was nothing good in 
him, but she believed that there must be an ex- 
planation. Sometimes it seemed as if the Arthur 
Gordon she had once known had disappeared. 

‘“Perhaps the best thing to do,’’ the social 
worker suggested, “would be to start at the be- 
ginning and see whether that won’t help us to de- 
cide what to think.”’ 

She already knew much of what Mrs. Gordon 
would tell her, but she wanted Mrs. Gordon to 
provide a basis from which her past might be in- 
terpreted to her. And so, with the help of a few 
sympathetic questions, Mrs. Gordon, beginning 


96 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


with her early life, told her story up to the time 
of her husband’s desertion. 

She had had a loveless and unhappy childhood. 
Both her parents had died before she had reached 
her sixth year and she had been brought up by an 
aunt who regarded the task as an unwelcome 
obligation and did not forget to impress this upon 
her niece. Having lived for a time in the city, the 
aunt moved to a village where there were no 
amusements and nothing which interested the girl 
until Mr. Gordon appeared. He was on a vaca- 
tion, a good-looking, dashing sort of fellow, ap- 
parently ambitious, and with more of an educa- 
tion than Mrs. Gordon had had. He began an 
ardent courtship. It was the first time since her 
mother’s death that any one had shown her affec- 
tion. She fell in love with him, and after she 
had accepted his proposal of marriage he se- 
duced her. She was ignorant of the significance 
of what she was doing, for she had only the 
most rudimentary knowledge of the physiology 
of sex. 

A little while later, when the doctor whom she 
consulted told her that she was pregnant, she be- 
lieved that she had committed the unpardonable 
sin. All the background of her religious training 


FACING THE FACTS 97 


seemed to draw in about her and she felt that she 
was cursed of God. 

When Mr. Gordon consented to marry her, she 
saw him stooping down to lift up a fallen woman 
and save her from disgrace. Wholly overlook- 
ing his greater responsibility, she ever after felt 
toward him a sense of gratitude which blinded her 
to his many failings. 

After their marriage they went to a city in the 
Middle West where Mr. Gordon began selling 
automobiles. Another baby closely followed the 
first, and, either by reason of her pregnancy or the 
necessity for taking care of the children, Mrs. 
Gordon was unable to take part in the social life 
of her husband, who soon developed a large ac- 
quaintance. He told her little about his business, 
except to say that it frequently necessitated ab- 
sences from town. Accordingly, she did not worry 
when he was away from home for a week at a time. 
At first he had made a point of celebrating the an- 
niversaries of their married life with gifts to her 
of flowers, or candy, or jewelry. This made an 
impression upon her that enabled her to overlook 
many lapses in conduct. 

Once a rumor came to her that he was having 
an affair with one of her friends, but when the 


98° THE ART. OGRVHEDPING PEOPLE 


woman assured her that the gossip was without 
foundation Mrs. Gordon was glad to be able to 
believe her. 

Then, Mr. Gordon’s sales began to decrease 
and the finances of the household went from bad 
to worse. Mr. Gordon suggested that he go toa 
neighboring city and see whether business would 
not be better there. As soon as he had saved 
some money, he would send for his wife and chil- 
dren and they would reéstablish their home. 
That was two years before. The rest of their ex- 
periences the social worker knew. 

The story as related here was not the story that 
Mrs. Gordon told. Hers was simply a chronolog- 
ical recital of events. She did not attempt to 
evaluate her history. This the social worker now 
undertook to do for her. She began by taking 
Mrs. Gordon back over the story which she had 
just told. 

She explained the connection between Mrs. 
Gordon’s loveless childhood, her ignorance about 
sex, and her seduction by Mr. Gordon. She 
showed her the part her aunt’s insistence had 
played in Mr. Gordon’s willingness to marry her, 
the insincerity of her husband’s absences from 
home while he was still nominally living with his 


PACING DHE FACTS 99 


family, and how the woman who had denied any 
entanglement with him had deceived her. Then 
she helped Mrs. Gordon to see the significance of 
her husband’s silence during the two years of his 
desertion. 

The social worker was simply interpreting to 
Mrs. Gordon out of her own words the experi- 
ences through which she had gone. It was Mrs. 
Gordon who made the diagnosis. There seemed 
to be no other explanation, she said, except the 
one that her husband no longer cared for her. 
The social worker pointed out that perhaps he did 
not have the capacity for real affection. This 
might be either a temporary condition or a per- 
manent handicap. It was also possible that there 
might be some one else whom he loved. 

The ultimate fact, that Mrs. Gordon could not 
hope to be reunited with her husband and that 
upon her would fall the responsibility of making 
decisions for her children, was not mentioned, 
although, of course, it was present by implica- 
tion. It would be enough for her to start by con- 
sidering whether or not her husband loved her. 

Mrs. Gordon then had an interview with Mr. 
Gordon which showed how much she had profited 
by the discussion of her problem. She said that 


100 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


she had never realized that she could talk so 
frankly with him. They had gone over things 
together from the beginning, just as she and the 
social worker had done. 

Mr. Gordon told his wife that he would lie to 
her no longer. He admitted that his love had 
never been anything but physical. He said that 
she ‘‘would have to go on without him except for 
financial support’’ which he realized he must 
supply. Thus, he himself confronted his wife with 
the adjustment which she must eventually make. 

Neither this interview nor the one with the 
social worker was alone enough to cause Mrs. 
Gordon to accept the possibility of a permanent 
separation from her husband. The great revolu- 
tions in life are not so easily gone through with as 
this. These two interviews were just the begin- 
ning of her recognition that her home would have 
to be built upon a different basis. It required 
many weeks and the continued indifference of her 
husband to establish the inevitable finally in her 
mind and in her plans; but it was the revealing 
interview with the social worker that supplied the 
foundation for an understanding of what her life 
had been and the nature of the adjustment she 
must make. 


FACING THE FACTS IOI 


The procedure followed in this interview is 
frequently used in helping people out of trouble, 
and particularly, in helping them to understand 
and to face their problems. The process by which 
an individual tells the story of his experiences and 
then has that story retold to him as it appears to 
the person whom he has consulted is a funda- 
mental method of interpretation. The applica- 
tion of it will vary with circumstances but the 
same underlying principle is always involved. 

The initial telling serves two purposes — it 
usually relieves the feelings of the person in 
trouble, preparing him emotionally for the recep- 
tion of the truth and it makes his history vivid. 
He sees his life as a whole and is thus the better 
able to appreciate the significance of its events 
and relationships as they are revealed to him. 
Sometimes the mere act of reciting the facts 
clarifies his mind so that by the time he has com- 
pleted his story he is well on the way to an un- 
derstanding of it. Sometimes, also, the process of 
telling and of receiving a sympathetic hearing 
strengthens his confidence in the person who is 
listening to him and by that much facilitates the 
task of interpretation. 

The retelling of the story is not necessarily a 


102 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


literal rehearsing of the entire narrative. While 
occasionally it is precisely this, more often it be- 
comes rather a series of questions, suggestions, 
and comments which clear away the clouds of 
difficulty and discover the problem in its essen- 
tials. 

Presumably the person who is able to help 
brings to the work of interpretation the back- 
ground of a wider experience in the adjustment 
at hand than that possessed by the individual in 
trouble. This is an important consideration. It is 
what influences us in consulting a physician when 
we are ill. We seek an explanation of certain 
pains and disabilities through the medium of his 
greater knowledge of disease. It may be the first 
time that we have encountered this particular 
pain. To us it is unique. To him it is familiar, a 
symptom which he has observed in many different 
people. So, too, the trouble which puzzles a man 
can often be clarified by the experience of one 
who has seen other persons pass through the same 
difficulty. 

When William Flack lost his job, although 
through no fault of his, he felt a sense of failure 
and defeat. He began to have doubts about him- 
self. He was ashamed. He dreaded the inevi- 


FACING THE FACTS 103 


table question about what he was now doing. 
He wanted to avoid meeting his friends. He was 
loath to mention his predicament. Finally, he 
sought the advice of a person who had helped 
many men through the difficulties of unemploy- 
ment. This man told him that he was simply 
showing what were characteristic symptoms of 
his adjustment. They were almost inevitable ac- 
companiments of his problem and nearly every- 
body in a like situation was obliged to cope with 
them. The cure lay in admitting his predica- 
ment and in recognizing that only as he informed 
people that he was in the market for a job would 
he be likely to secure employment. The relief that 
William Flack felt in learning that his reactions 
to his problem were not unique is the relief which 
one can bring to many an individual who is in 
difficulty by giving him the perspective that comes 
from knowing what other people have felt and 
done under the same circumstances. 

The interpretation of this man’s problem was 
accomplished through a marshaling of testimony 
about what had occurred in many similar pro- 
blems. For Mrs. Gordon it involved reviewing her 
own intimate experiences with a person who not 
being involved in them was able to point out 


104 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


their significance to her. With the daughter of 
the widow who was about to become a mother it 
required a statement of the facts accompanied by 
an appeal to the child’s sympathies and to her in- 
stinct to protect. 

With each individual there was a difference in 
procedure, but it all led to the same conclusion — 
the facing of the facts. This is not an easy thing 
for anybody to do. It takes courage. Often one 
is tempted to follow the example of the boy who 
plays hookey to avoid taking an examination, 
even though the postponement only prepares a 
more unpleasant crisis. Often, too, like Chris- 
tiana in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, we 
are glad to have some one stand with us as we 
confront the experience. Yet not infrequently to 
face the adjustment strips it of much of its terror. 
To see what one is about to meet or what one is 
already grappling with is to be strengthened for 
overcoming it. Let a man face the facts of his 
life and he has gone more than halfway toward a 
solution of his problems. The surest way out of 
trouble will be found in a seeking of the truth. 


CHARTER sVIIT 
INTERPRETATION 


Who hath sailed about the world of his own heart, sounded each 
creek, surveyed each corner, but that there still remains therein 
much terra incognita to himself? (THoMAs FuLLER, The Holy and 
the Profane State.) 


Lord, and how some of us do imagine ourselves misunderstood, 
when the trouble is that we are understood by others, but not by 
ourselves. (F. P. A., “‘The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys,” 
New York World, October 30, 1922.) 


WERE our difficulties as wholly apart from our- 
selves as a problem in arithmetic the facing of 
them would be a simple matter. But they are not. 
Often the most critical fact in a man’s life is 
himself and frequently the diagnosis, ‘‘ He doesn’t 
know what he’s up against,’’ must be accompanied 
by the ety familiar one; ‘“‘He’s his own worst 
enemy.” 

He may be. unskillful i in handling himself. He 
may have unfortunate mannerisms. He may say 
the wrong thing in spite of his desire to say the 
right. He may have habits that are as hobbles to 
his efforts toward success. He may not appreciate 
his own worth. He may lack confidence in his 
ability. He may be making mistakes in behavior. 


106 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


He may not realize that in order to adjust himself 
to life he must change himself. 

It is rarely that in greater or less degree a man’s 
personality is not involved when he comes to face 
the predicament that is troubling him. To tell 
the unemployed man (see Chapter VII) that his 
sense of failure and of shame was a symptom of 
his unemployment was in a measure interpreting 
him to himself. After all, the real cause of his 
worry was lest there be something wrong with 
him. To learn that his difficulty was typical of 
what many other persons had suffered was to be 
assured that he was not peculiar in this respect 
and that, therefore, he was as good a man as he 
had ever been. His concern was himself, but to 
talk to him in terms of his adjustment was to 
make his problem objective rather than personal 
and thus to render it easier for him to grasp. 

For, although since our earliest school days we 
have been reared to believe the maxim, ‘Know 
Thyself,’ we find the acquiring of this knowledge 
through the vehicle of other people the most 
painful of all ordeals. Few of us can receive the 
slightest compliment without blushing or under- 
going a change in facial expression, and when the 
truth carries an adverse criticism our suffering 


INTERPRETATION 107 


is so great that we cannot recall what was said 
without feeling a repetition of the anguish we en- 
dured at the time. 

The pain of such experiences causes us to try 
in every way possible to protect ourselves from a 
recurrence of them. We will shy with all the 
timid alertness of a frightened animal from any- 
thing which appears to be leading us into this 
kind of a discussion. Once we are unavoidably in 
the midst of it we take various means of saving 
ourselves from hurt. Some people do this by 
pleasantly admitting everything that they are 
told, thus shortening and lightening the ordeal 
and escaping the unpleasantness of any extended 
thought upon the subject. Others surround 
themselves with an armour of temper, and through 
a quick anger prevent themselves from perceiving 
the truth that may disturb them. Others again 
guard themselves by unconsciously cultivating 
such an attitude of certainty about their qualities 
and characteristics that it is practically impos- 
sible for them to apprehend or to believe any- 
thing which contradicts their own opinion of 
themselves. Sometimes people reduce the dis- 
comfort of the experience by discounting the 
capacity of the individual who is presenting the 


108 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


truth to them. What, after all, does he know 
about it, and what right has he to speak as he does. 
He has failings of his own — and thus thinking, 
they avoid or relieve any injury to their feelings. 

Some people develop a too great willingness to 
engage in discussions about themselves and their 
problems. Just as not infrequently a sick person 
who has dreaded the thought of an operation 
comes to like the life of the hospital so much that 
he acquires what the doctors and nurses speak of 
as hospitalitis, and will even, for the sake of re- 
turning to the institution, complain of symptoms 
which require a surgeon, so, too, some individuals 
having had the experience of an exposition of 
themselves will seek a repetition of that experi- 
ence at every opportunity. Nothing delights such 
an individual more than a description of himself 
as this or that sort of man, even though the criti- 
cism be of a derogatory nature. He likes to think 
of himself as a case to be studied, but in spite of 
the advice he receives he makes no effort to 
change. Once the initial sensitiveness to criticism 
has been dulled, this is a state of mind into which 
almost anybody can fall. The individual who is 
thus afflicted becomes so much interested in 
thinking about himself that he loses the habit of 


INTERPRETATION 109 


action and becomes an ineffective human being, 
useless both to himself and to others. 

The interpretation of a man should not, there- 
fore, be undertaken without some assurance that 
he will be able to profit by it. Usually one will do 
best to wait until the person in trouble asks for 
this service. His request may be direct or implied. 
That it is spoken may not, however, necessarily 
mean that it is intended. A man may ask for ad- 
vice about himself when he is too overwrought to 
apprehend what may be said to him. He may 
urge that he be told the truth when it is not the 
truth that he wishes to hear. What he desires to 
be told is that in his attitude and behavior he is 
being the only sort of person he could be under 
the circumstances. On the other hand, often 
those to whom we long to tell the truth know it 
before we speak, and when we tell them that which 
we think is new to them we are only confirming 
what they have long suspected. On every count 
the rR anc upon the person who 
feels that he must offer to help a man to face the 
facts about himself. 

What this process of interpretation involves 
when once it is called for may be seen in part in 
the story of Salvatore Donato. 


10 THE ARTIOR HELPINGIPEOPER 


Donato was a violinist of fair ability, but a 
fondness for liquor, unwisely indulgent parents, 
and a wife whose standards of home-making were 
below his own, had contributed to his deteriora- 
tion. For fifteen years he had slipped from one 
failure to another until at last he was going about 
the streets seeking alms in return for his music. 
Even in this he was unsuccessful, and at length his 
wife and his five children and he were reduced to 
living in three miserable rooms. They faced a 
winter without money for fuel and with no ap- 
parent means of paying the rent now overdue or 
of providing the next day’s food. Donato’s par- 
ents had come to the rescue on so many similar 
occasions that they were unwilling to help, and 
Mrs. Donato appealed to a social agency. 

A social case worker called upon the family 
in the late afternoon and found Mr. and Mrs. 
Donato and their children sitting in semi-dark- 
ness. There had been no money with which to buy 
oil. Before entering the house the social worker 
had obtained from Mr. Donato’s father, and from 
several other persons a general knowledge of the 
situation and of Mr. Donato’s difficulties. 

‘“‘Tf I am to be of any help to you,” she began, 
‘‘T shall need certain information.’’ She drew a 


INTERPRETATION III 


chair close to one of the windows, and, departing 
from her usual practice, put her inquiries to Mr. 
Donato in almost questionnaire form, entering 
the answers upon a pad. She was as impersonal in 
her manner as a physician would have been in in- 
quiring about symptoms. She asked the name of 
his present employer —he had none; his last 
job — he had had none for years; his vocation; 
his means of livelihood; his early successes; his 
membership in an orchestra; and so on through 
his life. In this the social worker was making a 
different application of the same method as that 
illustrated in the interview with Mrs. Gordon (see 
Chapter VII). Through her questions she was 
taking Donato back from the present to the past 
and helping him to tell himself what he had been. 
She made no attempt to evaluate the facts which 
were being set forth. She accepted them without 
comment. Everybody else who had dealt with 
Donato had berated him, had told him that they 
were disgusted with him, and in similar ways had 
expressed their scorn, arousing within him protec- 
tive emotions which prevented him from appre- 
ciating the truth of what they said. 

Having led him to recapitulate his life she looked 
up from her notes: ‘‘ Now, tell me, Mr. Donato,” 


112 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


she asked, ‘‘what is the trouble?’’ Her manner of 
speaking was one of consideration and respect. 
The interview thus far had enabled her to recog- 
nize in him that which his parents and even his 
wife had forgotten. Along with the signs of weak- 
ness she saw a certain sensitiveness and something 
akin to fineness. Not for years had any one ad- 
dressed this side of his nature. 

‘‘Tt is as you see,”’ he replied sadly. ‘‘We are at 
the end.’”’ He was seated opposite to her. 

She leaned toward him. “It is terrible for you 
to be living like this,’’ she said in a tone low 
enough to reach his ears alone. Other people had 
told him what they thought about him in voices 
loud enough to inform the whole neighborhood. 
“You played in an orchestra, and now’’ — she 
hesitated — ‘‘you beg.” 

That sentence brought the whole picture into 
focus. | 

“The more I thought about it, the more 
ashamed I felt,’’ Donato told a friend to whom 
some months afterward he described the inter- 
view. The social worker had succeeded in ena- 
bling him to see himself. The remainder of the 
interview was only a confirmation of her accom- 
plishment. 


INTERPRETATION 113 


‘But what can I do?”’ Donato was apologetic. 
‘“‘T have no money. I have pawned my violin.” 

“You can work.” 

‘“My leg,’”’ he replied; “I am lame. No one 
would take me.”’ 

“You can get a job here,” the social worker 
told him, scribbling the address of an employ- 
ment bureau upon her card. ‘“‘I’ll see that you 
have a better pair of shoes,” she added, noticing 
the condition of those he was wearing. 

The effect of the interview was more instant 
than she had realized. Although she called early 
the next morning with the shoes, Donato had 
gone to the employment bureau in a pair of 
leather slippers—it was crisp winter weather — 
and had secured a job asa laborer, a place that he 
held for six months until it was possible for him to 
return to music as a vocation instead of as an in- 
troduction to alms. 

There were several reasons for the social 
worker’s 7h gaat ‘first place, she acted 
from a well-founded knowledge of the man, ob- 
tained from his parents, his physician, and others 
who had tried to help him. It was this knowledge 
_ which made it possible for her to point the inter- 
view as she did. There is a vast amount of harm 


t114 THE ART{OF HELPING PEOPLE 


done by well-intentioned people who in a first in- 
terview with a stranger give him advice which 
rests upon nothing but the impression they have 
gotten of him in the course of this initial conversa- 
tion. 

The atmosphere of impersonality which the 
social worker cast about the interview was an- 
other factor in her success. By approaching 
Donato objectively, by not evaluating what he 
told her or commenting upon it until she spoke 
the critical sentence in which she compared his 
present beggary with his happier past, she pre- 
vented the rising of beclouding emotions. The 
impartial and unbiased way in which she ad- 
dressed him took him in a sense outside of himself 
and enabled him to see Donato as he was. 

This attitude of impersonality is exceedingly 
important. Usually, as with Donato, the person 
in trouble has passed through that trying stage 
when relatives and neighbors take sides for and 
against him, blaming or condoning, chiding or 
sympathizing, until his feelings have become 
oversensitized to any discussion of himself. The 
objectivity of a stranger is like the application of 
the antiseptic solution that cleans the infected 
wound. 


INTERPRETATION 115 


The very intimacy of our relations with the 
members of our families and with other friends 
makes it difficult for them to help us to face the 
facts about ourselves. We are too cognizant of 
their limitations and their weaknesses to give 
weight to what they say. It not infrequently 
happens that the more dearly we love them the 
more animus we seem to find in what, with every 
good intention, they tell us about ourselves. This 
is not to say that often the best person to reveal 
the truth to a man is an intimate friend, but it does 
mean that the chances for success rest with the in- 
dividual whose relationship with him is distinctly 
an impersonal one. 

In such a relationship stand the psychiatrist, 
the teacher, the physician, the social worker, the 
lawyer, the clergyman, the employer. In varying 
degree and under different circumstances these 
occupy a position of authority. Their place, 
their experience, and their special knowledge give 
us confidence in them. Their opinions have credit 
with us. With them we can develop a kind of 
oblique objectivity. We can receive the truth 
from them with less hurt because we feel that it 
is not our whole selves that we are presenting for 
review but only that part of us which is student, 
employee, parishioner, patient, or client. 


116 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


There is also that in our relationship with them 
which in our minds seems to vest them with the 
right and the duty under suitable circumstances 
to tell us that which we need to know about our- 
selves. Donato did not specifically ask the social 
worker to show him the facts about himself, but 
he instinctively recognized the appropriateness of 
her doing this. In seeking medical advice the 
patient realizes that the state of his health may 
make it necessary for his physician to discuss 
with him his most intimate habits. It is taken for 
granted that a teacher may discover in the quality 
of a student’s work a need for helping him to per- 
ceive mistakes in behavior, and it is generally un- 
derstood that at the time of employment, of pro- 
motion, of discharge, and in many other situa- 
tions an employer may find it important to give 
an employee an estimate of his personality and 
work. 

It is a question whether often under such cir- 
cumstances the employer does not owe his em- 
ployee this service, provided, of course, he recog- 
nizes in him an attitude of mind which will enable 
him to accept what he is told. For to be able to 
receive the truth requires the capacity for im- 
personality in the person who is being helped as 


INTERPRETATION 117 


well as in him who is helping. There are few 
tributes to character that are higher than that 
which is paid a man when an employer takes his 
open-mindedness for granted by telling him why 
he is not offering him the position for which he has 
applied or why he is not promoting him. Some 
executives go farther than this, and as a matter of 
routine give each member of the staff an oppor- 
tunity once or twice a year to learn how he and 
his work are regarded. This practice, applying 
as it does to everybody, throws an atmosphere 
of impersonality about the whole process and 
smooths the way to a reception of the truth. 

The truth is as important as the impersonality. 
This is frequently forgotten. Too often we are in- 
clined to speak in the spirit of Mrs. King, of ‘Old 
Chester Tales,’’ who told people things flatly and 
frankly for their own good out of a sense of duty. 
To interpret a man to himself is to set forth not 
merely that which is unfavorable. This sort of 
half-truth only hurts and blocks him. It is the 
balanced presentation that wins a hearing. 

The social worker told Donato the whole 
truth. She referred to the unfortunate elements 
in his character but she also recognized his 
strengths. That she herself was a musician helped 


118 THE ART OF HELEING (PEOPER 


her perhaps the more quickly to sense his possi- 
bilities, but to use one’s every resource is part of 
the art of helping people and does not vitiate the 
principle that in explaining a man to himself it is 
important to set forth his assets as well as his 
liabilities. Emphasis at the start upon his posi- 
tive qualities strengthens him for learning about 
his weaknesses. The consciousness that he is ap- 
preciated for his successes enables him to con- 
sider his failures in a hopeful and constructive 
spirit. 

This method of interpretation prepares the 
way for the next process which is exemplified in 
the interview with Donato. Having, through the 
recognition of his ability, aroused within him the 
desire to change, the social worker offered him an 
opportunity to act. She made the concrete and 
practical suggestion that he take a job. Without 
something definite to do, something to work 
toward, any discussion of a man with himself is 
likely to encourage a morbid introspectiveness 
that defeats the very end we would accomplish. 
The way men change is by following thought with 
action, and in offering opportunity for the one it 
is important to offer opportunity for the other. 

Action, a balanced presentation, impersonality, 


INTERPRETATION 11g 


these three things underlie the process of explain- 
ing a man to himself. They apply also to the in- 
terpretating of his adjustments to him and to 
many other phases of the art of helping people 
out of trouble. 

In one respect the story of Donato is not 
typical. His change was far more immediate than 
usually happens. Most people arrive at an under- 
standing of themselves only gradually. It is a 
slow dawning rather than a sudden flash. 

Self-knowledge is a triumph of intelligence over 
emotion, but such victories do not come quickly. 
Human beings surround themselves with such a 
network of sensitiveness that any close approach 
to their personalities is often impossible. Fre- 
quently one must try to accomplish by indirection 
what one would prefer to bring about through 
more direct methods. One must explain adjust- 
ment after adjustment, in the hope that at last by 
implication the individual may come to realize 
that the fundamental difficulty lies in himself. 
Sometimes he can be helped to self-understanding 
through an interpretation to him of those who are 
involved in his adjustment. Sometimes one must 
_ give up hope of interpretation by any means and 
must rely instead upon quickening his desires 


120; .THE ART: OF: HELPING PEOPLE 


and extending his interests and upon other phases 
of the art of helpfulness. It must be remembered 
that the facing of a man with the facts about him- 
self isa method, not anend, a method fraught with 
difficulty and to be adopted only when there is 
good assurance of success. The surest way out of 
trouble is the recognition of the truth, but those 
that achieve this are exceedingly few. 


CHAPTER VEX 
MEDIATION 


What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his 
feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, ‘A pain 
in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.’ 
He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is 
cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires. .. . So, dimly 
and by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast 
known him not, being blind. Thou hast made [of him] a thing, 
no Self atall. (Jostam Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy.) 


INASMUCH as few people are solitary, most per- 
sons being framed in a vast variety of relation- 
ships, having families, homes, neighbors, and 
many other affiliations, there is nothing more im- 
portant to success in living than an appreciation 
of our fellows or more fraught with trouble than 
a failure to understand them. Blindness to the 
thoughts and desires and feelings of others seems, 
nevertheless, to be acommon human trait. Itisat 
the bottom of many a maladjustment. It appears 
again and again as a disturbing factor in mar- 
riage, in widowhood, in adolescence, in work, in 
single life. Nearly everybody has at some time 
been called upon to repair the damage which it 
_has caused. 

The remedy lies, obviously, in clearing away 


to2) (THE AR DOR np P ins (PROP IEE 


whatever misunderstandings exist. It is a work of 
interpretation, of mediation, and often of arbitra- 
tion, the underlying principle always being the 
explanation of one person to another, as, for ex- 
ample, Mrs. Reynolds was explained to her hus- 
band. 

He was out of patience with her. There had 
been trouble between them for many months. 
She was insanely jealous of him and without 
cause accused him of being unfaithful to her, even 
going to the hospital to see whether a woman, 
who was ill there, a fellow employee of his had 
not supplanted her in his affections. She mis- 
trusted that he was withholding part of his wages 
from her, as indeed he was, and the disturbance 
which she made at his place of employment was 
undoubtedly a factor in bringing about his dis- 
charge. When he learned that he had lost his job, 
he took some money which had come to him as 
part of a legacy and gave himself up to alcohol. 
He had not been home for several days when the 
following interview took place. 

‘“‘T suppose I am to blame for it all,’’ he began 
sullenly. ‘I have done all sorts of things, I sup- 
pose, with no cause at all.” 

‘“‘T am neither blaming nor praising you,’’ the 


MEDIATION 123 


social case worker replied. ‘‘If I did I wouldn’t 
have asked you to come to my office and tell your 
story.” 

“Oh, what’s the use of my talking,’’ Reynolds 
retorted unconvinced. ‘‘My wife’s been black- 
guarding me to you.” 

““Now, Mr. Reynolds, you know that I know 
too much about your situation to be influenced by 
anything that anybody might say to me, but I 
can only help you if you will lay your cards down 
on the table and be fair with me.”’ 

“‘Oh,” he exclaimed. ‘“‘I admit that I’ve been 
drinking. Any man would have if he’d been 
through what I’ve been through. You take a 
horse out and beat it and he will act ugly toward 
you. It’s the same way with a human being. If 
she would only have a little faith in me and speak 
a kind word to me once in a while, I could go ahead 
and keep things decent.”’ 

‘I know it’s been hard for you,’’ he was as- 
sured, ‘“‘but your wife has a pretty hard time of it 
too. She’s at home all day working. She scarcely 
sees anybody except the children and they’re a 
good deal of a trial. Anybody would be nervous 
with five of them running in and out all day long.”’ 

‘“Yes, but she needn’t criticize me to them. 


124 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


Why, she even sent Sarah to Fifteenth Street to 
watch where | went from the factory. The way 
she talks to me, the children don’t respect me any 
more.’ 

“Tf you heard how nicely Harry talks about 
you, you wouldn’t think so,’’ the social worker 
replied. ‘And, after all, you did tell your wife 
that your wages were less than they were. That's 
why she sent Sarah.” 

“‘And last pay-day she came herself,’’” Reynolds 
interrupted, ‘‘and made such a fuss that I lost my 
JOD. 

“She told me all about it,’’ explained the social 
worker. ‘She knows that she was responsible for 
your discharge. She is very sorry. She said so to 
me several times.”’ 

Reynolds was mollified by this. He seemed 
pleased that his wife had admitted her mistake. 
“Only I wish she had told it to me,” he remarked, 
and added that it was the loss of his job and Mrs. 
Reynolds’s belief that he had been unfaithful to 
her which had driven him to drink. 

“Tf it hadn’t been for her going to the hospital 
to see Miss Arsen, I wouldn’t have gone on a 
spree. Miss Arsen is fifty, if she’s a day. The 
only time I ever saw her was at the factory, ex- 


MEDIATION 125 


cept when she first got sick. Then I took her pay 
to her house. But I had nothing else to do with 
her, and when my wife went out to the hospital to 
see her and asked for the maternity ward, that 
was the last straw.” 

‘“Your wife told me about that too.’”’ Reynolds 
stared at the social worker in surprise. ‘And 
I think she really feels badly about it and is 
ashamed.”’ 

The man was amazed and appeased by this, 
too much so to reply, and the social worker con- 
tinued: 

‘‘A good deal of your wife’s trouble is caused by 
her nervousness. People are just like the machines 
you run at the steel works. Some of them are 
more complicated and harder to understand than 
others. If you don’t handle them properly, they 
break and do a lot of damage. When you have a 
machine you don’t understand, don’t you try 
one way and then another until you find the one 
that works? Think how much time and patience. 
you take over a machine of steel. And how much 
more complicated human beings are!”’ 

_“That’s true,’ the man admitted. ‘‘That’s 
true. She is nervous and I guess she does have a 
hard time. Well, she seems to know what’s what 


126 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


now and I’ll do the best I can if she will do her 
part.’’ Then, as he rose to go, he added: 

‘It’s easy for me to keep from drinking. You 
won't catch me going on another spree now.” 

He kept his word. Moreover, he made an 
earnest effort to understand and to conciliate his 
wife, and it was only her mental condition which 
ultimately caused them to decide upon a separa- 
tion as the one possible solution. 

In this interview the social worker did three 
things. She told Mr. Reynolds that his wife 
recognized her mistakes and was sorry for them. 
At the same time she did not let him forget that 
he had not been truthful about his wages. When 
errors have been made, it is usually wise to dispose 
of them by admitting them. This clears the way 
for a new understanding. It would have been 
better if Mrs. Reynolds could have done this for 
herself, but, since she could not, there was an ad- 
vantage in having the social worker act for her, 
inasmuch as she could point out to Mr. Reynolds 
wherein he too had been wrong, a task which his 
wife could scarcely have undertaken without 
jeopardizing the chances of a better relation- 
ship. 

The next step consisted in showing Mr. Rey- 


MEDIATION 127 


nolds some of the difficulties which were handi- 
capping his wife. There is no more certain way of 
bringing about an understanding of an individual 
than to describe the obstacles with which he or 
she must contend. It awakens sympathy and also 
explains the reasons for actions of which other- 
wise there would be adverse criticism. 

Lastly, the interview was clinched by the 
analogy of the machine and the human being. 
This was an attempt to interpret Mrs. Reynolds 
in terms of Mr. Reynolds’s own experience. It 
was an application of that fundamental principle 
in education which advises one to proceed through 
the known to the unknown. 

Throughout the interview, of which what has 
been quoted was only a part, the social worker did 
not fail to give a sympathetic hearing to all that 
Mr. Reynolds said, even when she was obliged to 
tell him that she could not agree with him. By 
the time he left her office he had relieved himself 
of the emotions which had prevented him from 
thinking clearly about his predicament. To allow 
-an angry man “to have IWs say”’ is the surest 
method of bringing him to reason. Feelings dis- 
sipate themselves in their own explosion, but ac- 
cumulate in violence as they are forced back by 


128 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


antagonism, a law of human nature which every 
one recognizes in the abstract, but which few ob- 
serve when the emotional outburst is directed 
against them or when it is their part to listen to it. 

Another important phase of interpretation con- 
sists in showing what might be called the average 
expectation of human beings. This was what Mrs. 
Cavallo needed to know in order to understand 
her son, Tony, who ran away from home one day 
taking with him twenty dollars which she had set 
aside for the payment of the rent. 

“Tony no good — too bad,’”’ Mrs. Cavallo com- 
plained. ‘I treat him right. I give him clothes. I 
give him money for lunches. I give him car-fare.” 

‘““That’s just the trouble,”’ explained the social 
worker. “‘ You give him only the money he has to 
have. You must remember Tony is growing up. 
He wants a good time, wants todo as other boys of 
his age do. He sees other boys going to the movies 
and he wants to go too.”’ 

Mrs. Cavallo raised another objection. 

“T sit here. I sew all day, all night. He stay 
out nights, no come in.” 

‘“ How late?” asked the social worker. 

“Sometimes half-past nine, sometimes ten 
o'clock.” 


MEDIATION 129 


‘“That’s not so bad,’’ Mrs. Cavallo’s visitor as- 
sured her. “If a boy of sixteen is in by ten 
o’clock, that’s early enough.” 

‘Tony no good, though,” returned the mother, 
shaking her head. “He steal twenty dollars that 
I save for house [meaning rent] and coal.”’ 

‘‘How did you get the twenty dollars?” her 
visitor inquired. 

“Tony give me his pay every week. I save 
twenty dollars.” 

‘Well, then,’’ the social worker explained, 
“Tony probably didn’t think that he was stealing 
the money. He thought it belonged to him. He 
had earned it. You mustn’t expect a boy of his 
age to feel the same responsibility toward the 
family that you do.” 

_ But Mrs. Cavallo found still another objection. 
_ Tony just like his father. He no good.” 

‘“‘If Tony has had as bad a father as you say, 
how do you expect him to support you like a good 
husband?” was the response. ‘‘ He hasn’t had any 
example to live up to.” 

“He talk like his father,’’ continued Mrs. 
Cavallo, still apparently unconvinced. ‘‘He talk 
bad to me. When I tell him to do something, he 
talk bad. He say — ‘I do as I darn please.’”’ 


130° THE ART ORC EEBING PEOPLE 


‘‘He’s always heard his father talk that way,” 
the social worker reminded the mother. ‘“ Be- 
sides, he thinks he has the right to do as he pleases 
because he earns his own money.”’ 

Thus far Mrs. Cavallo had shown no indica- 
tion of any appreciation of Tony’s side of the argu- 
ment, except to change the subject after each of 
the social worker’s comments. Now, however, 
she said: 

‘‘A friend tell me my husband say Tony come 
over there to see him. You, please, go over and 
see my husband and Tony.”’ 

“Will you take Tony back?”’ the social worker 
asked. 

‘Yes,’’ answered Mrs. Cavallo, evidently from 
a variety of motives. “‘No good for Tony to be 
over there. We need Tony.” 

“Will you give him money from his pay and 
let him have a good time two or three nights a 
week?” 

“Yes, I do that.” 

The social worker, having progressed thus far 
in helping the mother to a more reasonable atti- 
tude toward her son, now went to see the father, 
who was separated from his wife and was living in 
a neighboring city. Mr. Cavallo promised to tell 


MEDIATION 131 


Tony to call to see the social worker, but Tony 
did not do so. She, therefore, went once more to 
see Mr. Cavallo, this time in the company of Mrs. 
Cavallo, who had several matters of business to 
transact with him. They found father and son 
together. 

The interview that ensued was decidedly to the 
advantage of the mother. The man was consider- 
ably older than the woman, as lifeless and careless 
as she was energetic and neat. He was not well, 
and doubtless his irritability was partly due to 
this cause, but he stormed about needlessly while 
his wife was quiet and dignified. All the differences 
that had existed between the two appeared in the 
discussion and the substantial qualities of Mrs. 
Cavallo became more and more evident. 

The social worker had not planned the inter- 
view as a demonstration for Tony, but since it 
was developing in this way she allowed the boy to 
_ watch his parents for a few minutes. Then she 
took him aside. 

‘Well, Tony,” she said, ‘‘I have heard some- 
thing about this trouble that you and your mother 
have had, and I’d like to hear your side.”’ 

Tony was moody and sullen, but also a bit 
ashamed. 


132° THE ART OF, HELPING PEOPLE 


“‘T got tired of giving all my wages to her and 
hearing her talk,’”’ he grumbled. 

‘‘Why did she scold you?” the social worker 
asked. 

“She didn’t think I ought to go out with the 
fellows. She didn’t want me to go to the movies.” 

‘‘Tt was only her desire to do the best for you,” 
the social worker explained. “‘She meant well. 
You know that boys sometimes get into trouble 
‘by hanging around the streets at night.” 

‘‘She wouldn’t give me my money,”’ Tony ob- 
jected. 

“That was because your mother thought the 
money could be better spent at home. She has to 
think of the whole family. You want your sisters 
to be well dressed, don’t you? You ought to be 
proud because she wants to have nice things and 
because she keeps the house so clean and neat.” 
The social worker now made a direct plea to the 
boy. “‘She’s lonely without you. She needs some 
one at home to protect her. If you will come 
back, she has promised to give you spending 
money and to let you go out at night.” 

Tony was plainly appeased by what the social 
worker told him, but he was too stubborn to yield 
at once. 


- MEDIATION 133 


“Well, I'll think it over,’’ was all he would say. 
But a few days later he visited his mother and 
within two weeks he was at home. 

In addition to explaining the son to the mother 
in terms of what boys ordinarily want and do, 
and the mother to the son in the light of her re- 
sponsibility as a parent, the social worker in 
bringing about a better understanding also acted 
as a negotiator and mediator. She proposed a 
new working agreement to Mrs. Cavallo and sub- 
mitted it to Tony. It was a situation in which 
concessions must needs be made by both. It was 
a mutual adjustment. 

Peter and Annie Ainsley, on the other hand, 
represent the type of problem in which the ad- 
justment of a family depends chiefly and almost 
exclusively upon the actions of others. Their 
relatives had consulted a social worker in order to 
discover why Peter could not secure a better job 
and why Annie did not take better care of her 
home. They could not understand why she did 
not serve meals at regular hours; why her hus- 
band’s clothes were never mended; why her little 
daughter was not started for school early enough 
to enable the child to arrive there on time, and 
why, when the family moved into a new home, 


i34f THE ART OP TSLeinG (PEOPLE 


the furniture remained for days exactly where the 
moving men had left it. 

The social worker, having taken the man and 
the woman to a mental clinic, suggested that the 
relatives meet for a conference with her. There 
were ten adults in the group that gathered one 
evening at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Gardner, 
the parents of Mrs. Ainsley. All the brothers and 
sisters of the man and the woman were present. 
They had brought their children with them and 
every now and then the discussion was inter- 
rupted by the entrance of one or another of the 
youngsters. 

‘‘T am not going to try to repeat the doctor’s 
exact words,’’ the social worker began, for she 
knew her audience was composed chiefly of per- 
sons of no great education. ‘“‘But it amounts to 
this: Peter and Annie have never grown up men- 
tally. Their bodies are fully developed and they 
have the feelings of a man and a woman. They 
have fallen in love with each other and have 
married like the rest of you, but their brains are 
still those of a boy and a girl. Their minds haven’t 
changed since they were seven or eight years old.” 

Just then one of the children looked in through 
the door for a moment and then ran away. 


MEDIATION 135 


“Suppose Esther were suddenly to be given a 
great big grown-up person’s body to manage,’’ the 
social worker suggested after the little girl had 
left, ‘‘and suppose she were to have all the grown- 
up person’s responsibilities; the marketing, taking 
care of the children, finding a new house, plan- 
ning the meals, and all the other things, wouldn’t 
she make many of the same mistakes that Annie 
makes? As Esther’s body gets older, her mind 
will grow older too. She will be able to think 
what to do. She will learn by experience. But 
Annie so far as her mind is concerned is just 
where Esther is to-day. She always will be. The 
same is true of Peter. He and Annie aren’t able 
to decide things for themselves.”’ 

“Why, that isn’t the way Annie is at all,’’ in- 
terrupted one of the sisters. ‘“‘She knows per- 
fectly well what she wants and she knows how to 
holler for it too. She certainly can make an up- 
roar if she has a mind to.”’ 

‘‘Doesn’t that almost prove what I said?”’ the 
social worker replied. “‘Isn’t that just the way 
children act? Surely hollering or making an up- 
roar would not be your or my way of obtaining 
our wishes.” 

The company smiled, and the speaker continued: 


136 THE ART. OF HELPING PEOPLE 


| “Children know what they want, but they 
don’t always want the right things. We expect 
adults to decide rightly most of the time at 
least.’’ 

The family was plainly convinced of this point 
and she turned to another phase of the same 
question. 

“When Annie still lived at home, was she in- 
terested in a lot of different things or did she seem 
to be ‘hipped’ on only one thing?”’ 

‘Oh, my,” exclaimed the sister who had spoken 
before, ‘‘I guess she was ‘hipped’ all right. She 
used to be crazy about cleaning and wouldn’t 
even let father sit on any of the chairs after she 
had dusted. If he did, she’d almost throw a fit. 
Really, I don’t know what’s come over her lately, 
but since the baby came she hasn’t cared a bit 
about anything else.”’ 

‘‘Nothing has come over her,’ the social 
worker explained. “‘She simply hasn’t the ability 
to be interested in the many things you can be in- 
terested in. She has room for only one interest. 
Before she was married, she cleaned. After her 
marriage she wanted furniture and spent all her 
money for it. When the baby came she did noth- 
ing but take care of him and everything else had 


MEDIATION 137 


to go—cleaning, furniture, Peter, marketing, 
everything.” 

Old Mr. Gardner shook his head. 

“Yes,” he said, “I knowed right along that 
Annie was nothing but a child.”’ 

‘““That’s it exactly, Mr. Gardner,” the social 
worker concluded. ‘‘Annie and Peter are nothing 
but children. If you’ll remember this, you’ll have 
no trouble in understanding them and helping 
them.”’ 

She might have said that they were mental 
defectives. That she did not was the success of 
her explanation. She told the relatives about 
Peter and Annie in terms that were within the 
range of their experience, using the apparently in- 
explicable behavior of the Ainsleys as proof of the 
diagnosis which she advanced — Peter and Annie 
were nothing but children. 

In general, the same methods of interpretation 
were used both here and in the other instances 
that have been presented. While the dialogue 
was devious and prolonged and while what has 
been reported represents only the climaxes of the 
various conversations, they all bear testimony to 
the validity of certain fundamental principles. 

If, as with Tony Cavallo, the behavior of the 


138° THE ARTVOP JH BEBING PROPER 


person who needs to be explained is normal then 
it is only necessary to show that other people are 
doing the same thing; if abnormal, as with the 
Ainsleys, then the plea for understanding should 
be based upon the special handicaps of their ab- 
normality. One can usually gain a hearing and a 
sympathetic interest by describing the obstacles 
with which the individual in trouble must con- 
tend, but as with Mr. Reynolds, one must be 
careful also to give emotions an opportunity to 
express themselves. Finally, one must never fail 
to speak in the language of the experience of the 
man to whom one is talking, always proceeding 
through the known to the unknown. To observe 
these axioms of human intercourse is the essence 
of the art of helping people to understand each 
other. 


CHAPTER X 
PLANNING 


A man ought to express himself, ought to live his own life, say his 
own say, before silence comes. The ‘say’ may be bad —a mere 
yawp, and silence might be more becoming. But the same argu- 
ment would make a man dissatisfied with his own nose if it hap- 
pened to be ugly. It’s his nose, and he must content himself. So 
it’s his yawp, and he must let it go. (Walter H. Page in a letter to 
William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of Walier H. Page.) 


THERE is no phase of the art of helping people out 
of trouble that is more delicate or that cuts closer 
to the roots of one’s philosophy than that which 
has to do with the development of the plans by 
which an individual makes his way out of diffi- 
culty. As soon as a man appears to hesitate and 
to be uncertain about his future, there comes the 
temptation to suggest an appropriate course of ac- 
tion to him. The more obvious the course of ac- 
tion, the greater the temptation. Frequently his 
friends succumb to it and undertake to tell him 
what to do, urging and even insisting that he adopt 
their advice. 

To try to help a man in this way is to overlook 
one of the fundamental human impulses. This is 
that everybody wants to govern his own life and 


1440 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


to make his own decisions. Puzzled, bewildered, 
and buffeted though a man may be he never loses 
the urge to self expression. No matter how sub- 
missive he may have become to another’s sugges- 
tions, no matter how prone he may be to turn to 
some one else for the solution of his problems, 
when he reaches that which to him is vital he 
wants to be the arbiter of his own desires. 

How can he enter enthusiastically into a plan 
that is wholly the creation of some one else? He 
must have had at least a part in its conception. 
He must feel a sense of ownership in it. Without 
this there is little hope that the plan will be suc- 
cessfully executed or have anything of permanence 
about it. 

People vary greatly in the ability to devise 
ways of overcoming their difficulties. Some per- 
sons are quick to discover what they should do 
and need only freedom and opportunity to carry 
out their decisions. Others find it hard to origi- 
nate or to develop solutions of their problems. In 
. any event it is by freeing a man so that he can 
express himself and by stimulating him to do his 
own thinking that the best plans are developed. 
We may suggest, we may advise, but only as a 
subsidiary part of the process by which the indi- 


PLANNING I4I 


vidual in trouble is working out his own way of 
life. 

The application of this principle is as various as 
are human beings. In one of its aspects it is il- 
lustrated by the manner in which George O’Brien 
came to arrange for the care of his motherless 
baby. 

He had fallen in love with Mrs. Ledoux, whose 
husband had deserted her, and the young people 
— for they were still in their early twenties — 
had become parents without marriage. A few 
months after the baby’s birth, Mrs. Ledoux en- 
tered the last stages of consumption. She lived 
with her widowed mother and eight brothers and 
sisters. For her own comfort and for the protec- 
tion of the other members of the family, it was im- 
portant that she go to a hospital. This she hesi- 
tated to do. 

The social case worker who had been asked to 
help decided to discuss the situation with Mr. 
O’Brien, both because she knew that Mrs. Ledoux 
would enter the hospital if he wanted her to do so, 
and because it was important that some plan be 
made for the future of the baby. 

‘I’ve been quite anxious to have a talk with 
you about Mrs. Ledoux’s illness,’’ she said as she 


Ia? THE AR TVOPIMIEREING PEOREE 


shook hands with Mr. O’Brien. “‘She’s very sick 
and her mother doesn’t seem to realize it. I felt 
that you ought to know about her condition.” 

‘‘What did the doctor say?’’ asked O’Brien who 
knew that the social worker had consulted Mrs. 
Ledoux’s physician. 

‘‘He said that both her lungs were affected. 
She has scarcely any use of her right lung and her 
left lung is not much better. I’m afraid that he 
doesn’t feel hopeful. He talked very seriously to 
me about her. I fear that he doesn’t think she is 
going to get well.”’ 

For a moment O’Brien was too shocked to reply. 

‘“‘T didn’t have any idea,’ he began. ‘‘I knew 
she was sick. I didn’t think it was anything like 
thaty;’ 

The social worker waited until he had recov- 
ered himself. Then she said: 

‘You know that her home is no place for her in 
that condition.”’ 

‘‘T certainly do,” the man agreed. ‘‘It makes 
me sick to go there. I hate even to sit down 
there.”’ 

‘We ought to give her every chance, and make 
her comfortable. Won’t you see whether you can 
persuade her to go to the hospital?” 


PLANNING 143 


O’Brien promised to do so, and the social worker 
continued: 

‘“‘Tt’s going to be hard for the baby with her 
mother away. Have you any plan for taking care 
of the little girl?”’ 

O’Brien seemed to be greatly embarrassed by 
this turn in the conversation. His face flushed, 
and it was evident that it was a subject which 
was not easy for him to discuss. The best way of 
helping him would probably be to recognize his 
difficulty: 

‘‘T know it’s hard for you to speak about this, 
but I also know how devoted you and Alice are to 
each other, and I want you to feel that you can 
talk plainly to me about everything and that I 
will always understand.”’ 

“Yes,” O’Brien teplied, “I think you would 
understand. I’m awfully ashamed of having any- 
thing like that happen, but I really don’t want to 
do anything until after Alice is in the hospital.” 

“JT think you’re right,’’ the social worker 
agreed. ‘‘Of course you will first want to see that 
Alice is comfortable, but after she goes to the 
hospital I am afraid that the baby won’t get the 
care she ought to have.” 

“*T’ve always felt,’’ O’Brien said, ‘‘that if any- 


144 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


thing happened to Alice I would try to do what 
was right about the baby.” 

‘‘T’m not surprised to hear you say that. I’ve 
respected you ever since I heard about the way 
you've stuck to Alice and how you helped her 
after the baby came.”’ 

‘“‘You’re the first one that ever gave me credit 
for acting white. The whole neighborhood is 
down on me. They blame me for Alice’s being 
sick.” 

‘““That’s because they don’t understand. You 
know how the neighbors gossip. If only you could 
take your little girl away from it all. Do you 
think your mother could be persuaded to take 
her?” 

‘“‘T’ve never talked to her about it,”’ the man 
replied. “‘I don’t know how she’d feel about it.’’ 

‘‘T know you'd rather have one of your own 
people take care of the baby, but of course you 
could always place her with a foster mother. I’m 
sure I could help you to find one if ever you should 
want me to.” 

O’Brien listened thoughtfully. 

‘‘As soon as Alice is in the hospital, I will come 
to see you.” 

A few days later he told the social worker that 


PLANNING 145 


his sister with whom he had decided to make his 
home had agreed to care for the baby. The plan 
was carried out, and Mrs. Ledoux had the satis- 
faction of knowing before she died that the child 
would be reared by its father, and that its name 
would be Alice O’Brien. 

In all that was essential, the plan for taking 
care of the child was O’Brien’s. The social worker 
helped him to see that the time for planning had 
come. She confirmed him in his intention ‘to do 
what was right about the baby,” but she only sug- 
gested. She did not even advise. She was merely 
the means by which he began to think about what 
he should do, not an inconsiderable service, to be 
sure, when it is remembered that most unmarried 
fathers leave to the mother the responsibility of 
caring for the child. 

Such was the experience of Mrs. Darnell. She 
had, however, no difficulty in making a plan. 
What she needed was freedom for carrying it out. 
She had never been free. She had been so care- 
fully sheltered at home that she had been unpre- 
pared for life. At an early age she married a man 
who soon proved to be unfaithful to her, and after 
several years of unhappiness she obtained a di- 
vorce. The members of her family regarded the 


146 THE ART OP HEUPING PEOPLE 


whole experience as a reflection upon her ability 
to direct her own affairs, and they proceeded to 
manage them for her. They instituted a system of 
chaperonage and supervision which would have 
been irksome to a child, but the very man with 
whom, because he was married, Mrs. Darnell’s 
relatives thought she was safe, became the means 
of her seduction. 

Mrs. Darnell left her home and went to another 
city where her baby was born. Inasmuch as 
marriage with the father of the child was im- 
possible, she decided that she would try to make a 
home for herself and the baby. The only means 
was a place at service. No one in all her relation- 
ship had ever earned a living in this way, and when 
the members of the family learned about it, they 
felt that they had been doubly disgraced. Mrs. 
Darnell’s uncle hastened to call upon the social 
case worker to whom she had turned for advice. 

“This must all stop,” he announced. ‘‘We have 
everything planned for Edith. She is to come 
back home where we will take care of her. We'll 
place the baby in an institution and nobody need 
know that anything has happened.” 

Then he asked the social worker to persuade 
Mrs. Darnell to give up her plan and adopt the 


PLANNING 147 


one that he suggested. The social worker re- 
fused. She pointed out that the family had just 
witnessed the cost of repression. Why repeat the 
experiment? Mrs. Darnell now had in her love for 
the baby a controlling purpose and a reason for 
living. It was something that would steady and 
strengthen her. To deprive her of her child and 
the opportunity to plan her future would be to 
take away the greatest asset in her life. 

The man was unconvinced, but Mrs. Darnell 
was allowed to carry out her plan. She remained 
at service until she found employment which 
enabled her to establish a home for herself and 
her baby, and there, in less than a year, she enter- 
tained the members of her reconciled family. 
The service of the social worker had been to see 
that Mrs. Darnell’s relatives left her free. Fre- 
quently the greatest assistance one can give the 
person in trouble is to see that other people keep 
hands off and that he has a chance to work out 
his own salvation. 

It is seldom that a man can act without refer- 
ence to the ideas of some one else. Often plans 
must be developed by an interchange of thought 
between the persons affected. The art of helping 
may then consist in bringing the interested indi- 


148 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


viduals together so that they may discuss the sit- 
uation. This was what the social worker did for 
Peter and Annie Ainsley (described in Chapter 
IX), when she sat as the chairman of a family 
council in which a policy and a procedure for 
helping them were evolved. 

Although it is important to leave an individual 
free to make his own plans, this does not mean 
that one should blindly endorse every idea that is 
proposed by the person who comes for advice. 
The plan must be genuine and must have a rea- 
sonable chance of success. What results when 
these elements are absent is illustrated by the fol- 
lowing incident. 

A social worker had been endeavoring to aid 
Harry Wallou, a boy of nineteen years, to dis- 
cover his vocation. Perhaps because Harry felt 
that something was expected of him, he said that 
he would like to be a wireless telegraph operator. 
It was more a statement at a venture than the 
expression of a profound desire. It was not a 
genuine plan. The social worker obtained a job 
for him in a telegraph office from which, after six 
months, he was discharged as being utterly in- 
capable of acquiring even the rudiments of wire- 
less telegraphy, The boy’s lack of the necessary 


PLANNING 149 


intelligence and the appropriate educational back- 
ground could easily have been ascertained before 
his plan was endorsed. He had not originally sug- 
gested it with conviction and it would not have 
been difficult to show him that the idea was un- 
wise. He might have been spared the additional 
handicap of the sense of failure which the experi- 
ence brought him. Only too often a sanguine and 
enthusiastic personality will embark a man upon 
plans in which he has no fundamental interest, 
mistaking his acquiescence for a positive desire. 
Once the buoyancy and optimism of the helper is 
removed, the individual slackens his efforts be- 
cause he has never really made the plan his own. 

Sometimes the person in trouble will have a 
plan which is genuine, but which is unsound. Heis 
so eager to start upon the project that neither 
persuasion nor advice is enough to make its un- 
desirability evident. Under such circumstances 
it may be wisest to help him to learn in the only 
way by which, after all, most people learn, that is, 
by experience. 

‘A widow with two children was invited by her 
sister and her brother-in-law to make her home 
with them. They lived in a city three hundred 
miles distant. A social case worker learned that 


150 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


the real purpose of the invitation was to use the 
widow as a servant and that the personality and 
character of the sister and of her husband were 
such as to make living with them anything but 
congenial. She told these things to the widow, 
but when in spite of this the woman persisted in 
her wish to carry out her project the social worker 
helped her to prepare for the journey. Three 
months later the widow returned to her native 
city. She had been convinced of her mistake, and 
was now ready to develop a better plan. 

To learn by experience is expensive, and when 
health and morals are at stake it would seem dan- 
gerous to assume the responsibility of making an 
unwise experiment possible. Would it not be 
better then to force the individual to adopt the 
plan that is in his own best interest? 

The use of force is always a confession of fail- 
ure. It implies that one has not at the moment 
the skill or the knowledge to solve the problem 
which has been presented, for after all there 
usually is a solution. 

A man who was ill with tuberculosis was un- 
willing to go toasanatorium. Yet his carelessness 
and his failure to take precautions were menacing 
the health of his children. A social agency which 


PLANNING 151 


had been supporting the family refused to con- 
tinue to supply financial assistance so long as he 
remained at home. The man agreed to enter the 
sanatorium. After he had been there three 
months, he returned. When persuasion did not 
succeed in inducing him to go back, the refusal 
of support accomplished this purpose. Again he 
came home, and again the process was repeated. 
Altogether he was admitted three times to the 
sanatorium. Three times he returned, and, 
doubtless, it was only his death at the sanatorium 
which prevented him from coming back once 
more. This shows both the effectiveness and the 
ineffectiveness of force. The man went to the 
sanatorium, but he had nothing within himself to 
keep him there; yet, on the other hand, the use of 
force sent him back and saved his wife and chil- 
dren from contracting his disease. 

Sometimes the very fact that a man in such a 
predicament has a wife and children makes the 
use of force questionable, for the hardship which 
the lack of money may cause the family may in- 
jure the health of the children more than the pres- 
ence of the father. The cure is worse than the 
disease, and there always remains the question, 
suppose force fails, what then? 


152 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


Because a person says ‘no’ to-day does not 
mean that he will not say ‘yes’ to-morrow. This 
was certainly true of John Ellsworth. His mother 
had died leaving him with seven brothers and 
sisters, the youngest, a baby. Hewas only twenty- 
two years old. His sister Gertrude, was seven- 
teen. She was a stenographer. 

‘“What are you going to do?”’ asked the social 
worker. 

“Gertrude will give me ten dollars a week,” 
John replied confidently, ‘‘and I’m going to take 
care of the family.” 

‘Have you thought it out thoroughly? It takes 
a lot of money to clothe and feed so many chil- 
dren and to pay the rent and buy coal.” 

‘‘T don’t care,’’ said John, “‘that’s what I’m 
going to do.” 

‘Sometime you'll want to marry and have a 
family of your own. Could you ask a wife to take 
care of your brothers and sisters? What would 
you do if Gertrude married and left you to sup- 
port the whole family? I think you’re splendid to 
have the idea, but don’t you think it would be 
better if the youngest four children were sent to 
live with some other family? I'll be glad to help 
you place them.”’ 


PLANNING 153 


‘There isn’t any use talking,” John insisted. 
“I know what I’m going to do and that’s keep the 
children.”’ 

The social worker, seeing how determined he 
was, decided not to press him. 

Three or four days later she called again, but 
did not mention the subject. To do so would only 
strengthen John in his determination and weaken 
her influence with him. 

A little later John raised the issue. 

“You know, I’ve been thinking that it costs an 
awful lot of money to keep a family going, and I 
think the best thing I can do is to put the chil- 
dren away somewhere,’ and when the social 
worker offered to help him, he continued, ‘‘maybe 
you could do it better than I could — you just go 
ahead.” 

People are hardly ever convinced by argument. 
When a man has positive opinions, it is seldom 
wise to oppose him. It is vastly better to wait 
until more opportunity for thought or the logic 
of events convinces him. Then, when he arrives 
at a decision, the plan is his own. 

The more difficult the plan is of execution, the 
more vital to the individual in trouble does the 
sense of personal identity with it become. It was 


154 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


this which caused a social case worker to wait a 
year and a half for a family to decide upon a course 
of action, which during all this time she felt was 
necessary to their happiness. Husband and wife 
had begun to jar each other’s nerves. With rest 
and recuperation for the woman and a stay ina 
sanatorium for the man, the physical basis of 
their oversensitiveness to each other might be 
removed. But in order to accomplish this it 
would be necessary to break up the home and 
place the children temporarily with some private 
family. This would be a difficult step for the 
parents to take. The social worker knew that if 
she persuaded them to do it they would not be 
nearly so likely to hold to their decision as if they 
arrived at it of their own accord. Therefore, she 
suggested the plan and then waited until at last 
they came to see that it was the only possible 
solution of their difficulties. 

The more one works with people the more one 
realizes that the way of freedom is the only sure 
road to success. The plan that carries through is 
the plan that is a man’s own. Suggest it to him, 
perhaps, but only as a thought for him to digest 
and to make a part of himself. Offer him the 
stimulation that comes from a meeting of minds, 


PLANNING 155 


from the action and reaction of ideas, from the 
thinking out aloud with some one who under- 
stands; edit, perhaps criticize, but let the author- 
ship remain with him. It is both his right and 
the way of his salvation. 


CHAPTER XI 
THE CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 


The greatest mentality in the sea has been repeatedly derived from 
the continents, first in the fishes, then in the reptiles, and lastly in 
the mammals, and they have adapted themselves to the sea be- 
cause of the ease with which they can there prey upon the less 
alert and intelligent. Such adapted stocks in the course of geologic 
time grow larger and larger, as, for instance, the whales of today. 
Out of them, however, comes no higher mentality. They represent 
an adaptation in the wrong direction, that is, to an easier life, for 
the highest organisms with the greatest mentality have been de- 
veloped only on the land where the struggle for existence is fiercest 
because of the constant necessity of adaptation to an environment 
subject to intense changes. Organic supremacy is attained only 
through constant vigilance. (CHARLES SCHUCHERT, The Evolution 
of the Earth and its Inhabitants, chap. 1, ‘‘The Earth’s Changing 
Surface and Climate during Geologic Time.”’) 


AT the opposite pole of human nature from man’s 
desire to think and act for himself is his tendency 
to thrust upon others the solution of his problems. 
In its insidious way this inclination to escape re- 
sponsibility is as strong as his will to achieve his 
own salvation. It appears at every stage of life, 
from childhood to age, and, while it varies in in- 
tensity in different people, it is absent from no 
one. 

Weakness and inability are its special oppor- 
tunity. The strong man obviously is able to take 
care of himself, and is expected to do so. There is 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 157 


no excuse for him to transfer his responsibilities, 
and therefore less temptation for him to do so, 
but where there is weakness the opposite pre- 
vails. Then the need of help is recognized and the 
person in trouble by reason of his own insuff- 
ciency can hope that his fellows will carry his 
burdens. Many things are done for the sick 
which in health they would do for themselves. 
Children being unable to cope with all the vicissi- 
tudes of life unaided are spared responsibilities 
which in later years they must assume. The loss 
of a job may force a man to accept assistance in 
meeting his financial obligations, and there are 
many other circumstances in which people are re- 
lieved of tasks which ordinarily they would be ex- 
pected to assume. 

Unless help of this kind is extended with under- 
standing and foresight, it may become like the 
morphine which, having been administered out of 
the necessity for deadening pain, proves to be the 
means of forming in the patient an addiction to 
opiates. Once a man has enjoyed the luxury of 
having had his responsibilities carried by some 
one else, he finds the temptation to continue the 
period of weakness exceedingly difficult to resist. 

Every one has moments when he does not feel 


158 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


like exerting himself, and when he would willingly 
yield to this disinclination even though at the ex- 
pense of other people. All that we need at sucha 
time is a sufficient excuse. We tell ourselves that 
the hot weather is especially hard for us to bear; 
or it may be that we still feel the effects of the in- 
fluenza; or perhaps we are not qualified by ex- 
perience for the undertaking; or, as a last resort, 
we just do not feel equal to it. If we can prove 
this to ourselves we feel that we can preserve our 
self-respect; and if we can lead others to believe 
us we can induce them to do our work for us. 

This tendency which all of us occasionally ex- 
perience may become greatly accentuated in any 
one who frequently or over a long period of time 
has received help from others. He finds effort 
more and more difficult and dependence easier 
and easier, until at last his energies seem to suffer 
a kind of atrophy and he becomes a parasite upon 
his friends and a handicap to all with whom he is 
associated. 

One way of treating a person thus affected and 
of preventing his deterioration is to place respon- 
sibility upon him and to expect accomplishment 
of him. The doing of this involves more an atti- 
tude of mind than a definite procedure, a point of 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 159 


view that will be found to be more strongly de- 
veloped in some persons than in others. Is it not 
true that there is a vast variation in the amount 
of effort which different people draw from us? 
As between two men, equally friendly, equally in- 
terested in us, we will be more careful to present 
accomplishment to one than to the other, more 
punctilious in the keeping of appointments, more 
precise in the making of statements, more effective 
in every way. The reason for this is that we feel 
that the one expects more of us than does the 
other. The same fact holds good of our attitude 
toward those whom we are helping out of trouble. 
We can make our assistance stimulating or we can 
make it enervating in proportion as we look for 
strength or invite weakness. There is nothing 
more difficult in the art of helping than this, for 
one must maintain a nice balance between doing 
everything and doing nothing, varying the weight 
of responsibility according to the strength of the 
individual who is being helped. This calls for the 
most intimate knowledge of the person in diffi- 
culty, and even then, one is frequently at a loss to 
know how much or how little of achievement 
should be expected of him. 

Perhaps the simplest illustration of this is pro- 


160 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


vided by the experience of a father and his 
daughter, who, one winter’s day, were climbing a 
hill down which they had coasted. The snow was 
covered with a crust. Through this the man oc-, 
casionally broke and therefore found the ascent 
easier than did the girl, a child of about five years, 
who, as they came to the steep rise that defended 
the top, began to be in difficulty. Her feet slipped 
from under her. She fell. She slid back, and it 
seemed almost as if she would be unable to com- 
plete the climb. The father was greatly tempted 
to put forth his hand and pull the child out of 
trouble. Instead, he encouraged her to continue 
the struggle. Walking now beside her, now half a 
pace ahead, he tried to make a game of it, laugh- 
ing whenever the child fell, but with her, not at 
her, and cheering her on to greater effort, until at 
length the hill was conquered. Thereafter, with 
the experience and assurance of her first success 
the little girl repeated the victory with increasing 
ease. The mastery of the ascent strengthened 
her for the next attempt. Had not this achieve- 
ment been expected of her she would have been 
by just that much retarded in the development of 
self-confidence. At the same time, however, that 
her father was placing the responsibility of mak- 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 161 


ing the climb upon her he was helping her to ac- 
complish it. He gave her the assistance of his en- 
couragement and he aided her by pulling the sled 
up the hill. Had she been older and stronger, 
they would have pulled the sled together, or per- 
haps have taken turns, but the father recognized 
what was possible and what was not possible, 
and asked of her only that which she could per- 
form. 

This recognition of the possible and the im- 
possible is admittedly the crux of the problem of 
placing responsibility, a problem that cannot be 
solved by rule, but can be dealt with only on the 
basis of one’s understanding of the person whom 
he is helping. Generally speaking, parents in 
comfortable circumstances are likely to under- 
estimate rather than to overestimate the capacity 
of their children. Necessity compels the poor to 
expect self-reliance of their sons and daughters, 
but their wealthier neighbors have not this ad- 
vantage. It is not unusual for boys and girls of 
families in comfortable circumstances to enter 
the first year of school without being able to dress 
themselves, or even to lace their shoes, while the 
overanxiety of parents and the availability of 
motor-cars prevents many a child of eight or 


162 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


nine years of age from learning to go to school 
alone. 

Occasionally one finds instances of exactly the 
reverse of this, parents who expect too much too 
quickly. This often causes the children to feel 
that their elders have no sympathy for them and 
no understanding of them. Responsibility and 
self-dependence should be cultivated gradually, 
as was done by the parents of a seven-year-old 
girl in accustoming her to take herself to and 
from school. 

The child lived where electric cars and auto- 
mobiles passed continually, and the possibility of 
such an accident as every city mother dreads was 
always present. On leaving the electric car to 
walk to the school she was obliged to cross the 
street with its double tracks, and then, at the end 
of a block, a thoroughfare where the motor 
traffic was exceptionally heavy. The parents 
began by accustoming their daughter to the pas- 
sage of the street on which their home stood. At 
first the mother crossed with the child, empha- 
sizing, by example, the importance of watching for 
electric cars and automobiles, and of waiting for 
lulls in traffic. After a time she went only so far 
as the curb, leaving the little girl to complete the 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 163 


remainder of the journey alone. The next step 
was to watch from the window until her daughter 
waved to her from the other side. 

While the child was learning this lesson — and 
the home of a playmate across the way provided 
frequent occasion for it — one or the other of the 
parents took her to school. As soon as she had 
acquired the necessary skill and confidence, they 
began to reduce the distance which they accom- 
panied her at the school end of her journey, first 
stopping to watch her cross the automobile 
thoroughfare; then going only to the farther side 
of the street with the double car tracks, and at 
last discharging her from their tutelage by re- 
maining on the electric car while she stepped 
off by herself. Could any procedure be more 
simple? Yet, for lack of such elementary pro- 
cesses as these, children are sheltered beyond the 
years when they should be relying upon them- 
selves. 

Nor is it only children who are unwisely pro- 
tected in this way. The same mistake is frequently 
made by those who undertake to help people of 
foreign birth to adjust themselves to American 
life. Thus, a young woman who had entered 
training for social work devoted several hours 


164° THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


each week for a number of months to taking a 
woman of immigrant stock to a dispensary. The 
trip involved a change of cars which apparently 
the woman did not feel able to manage. Later, 
an experienced social case worker became ac- 
quainted with the woman. She explained that 
she would accompany her to the dispensary once 
more so that she could observe the way, but that 
she was too busy to undertake more than this one 
trip. The next expedition the woman made alone, 
and thereafter she continued to attend the dis- 
pensary without a companion. 

Often it is the subtle appeal to the pride of 
having some one consult us that prevents us 
from expecting accomplishment of the individual 
who seeks our help. There is nothing quite so 
flattering as to be asked to give advice. When a 
man comes to us in trouble we find it hard to re- 
sist telling him what, if we were in his place, we 
should do, and if he is at all inclined to be de- 
pendent upon others we are likely to assume the 
responsibility for most of his decisions, gradually 
depriving him of his self-reliance. 

This was the way in which the spirit of depend- 
ence had been developed in Henry Norton. His 
parents had died before he had reached ten years 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 165 


of age, and an aunt had become his guardian. 
She was a woman of strong personality, and this, 
together with her pity for her orphaned, and to 
her mind, therefore, helpless nephew, caused her 
to take the initiative in all decisions. The boy 
learned to turn to her for the solution of his every 
problem. He became more and more dependent 
upon her, a dependence of which apparently he 
was quite unconscious until her death in a rail- 
road accident. 

Without her he seemed to be unable to direct 
his life, and in his dilemma he turned eagerly to 
the social case worker who had met him in the 
course of her work among the survivors of the 
disaster. Where should he live? What would she 
suggest? The social worker recognizing his diffi- 
culty felt that to throw him immediately upon his 
own resources would be to send him to a depend- 
ence upon the first sympathetic person whom he 
might meet. On the other hand, to tell him what 
to do would be but to continue him in a habit 
which was already too strong. She decided upon 
a compromise. 

‘Well, what is there that you can do?’’ she 
asked. ‘‘Have you any place at all where you 
could live?”’ 


166 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


‘“‘My things are at the apartment, but I couldn't 
live there alone, could I[?”’ 

‘Would you want to?” 

“Tt would be lonely. What do you think I 
ought to do?” 

‘“‘How do the students at the university find 
rooms?’’ This question was designed to open the 
way for a new plan. 

‘“‘There is a registry of houses at the Dean’s 
office, and sometimes they answer advertise- 
ments in the newspapers.” 

The social worker purposely offered no sugges- 
tion, and the young man added, “I suppose I 
could go to see the Dean.”’ 

Having visited a number of possible living 
places, he returned. He wanted the social worker 
to make a choice for him. She questioned him 
about the advantages and disadvantages of each 
house, but when he asked her where she would go, 
if she were in his place, she put the responsibility 
upon him. ‘‘You’re the only person who can de- 
cide where you want to live,’”’ she told him. 

Finally, he made the choice, uncertainly, and 
tentatively, but nevertheless his own. It was a 
wise selection, and the social worker added to his 
assurance by telling him so. 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 167 


Almost immediately thereafter Norton was 
obliged to make up his mind about whether he 
should return to the university for a year of post- 
graduate study, or whether he should enter the 
field of advertising where an opportunity had 
been opened to him. Again, he turned to the 
social worker, and again she helped him by the 
indirect method of questioning instead of by tell- 
ing him what to do. She paralleled advantages and 
disadvantages for him, but having done this she 
once more placed the decision upon his shoulders. 

The man with whom Norton was now making 
his home perceived the young man’s problem and 
supplemented the work of developing his spirit 
of self-reliance. The following comment was 
typical of the way in which this friend threw 
Norton back upon his own resources. 

“The engine is stalled and I think I'll ask her 
to crank it,’’ Norton had said by way of explain- 
ing that he was discouraged and was going to the 
social worker for inspiration. 

‘““Wouldn’t she prefer having you use a self- 
starter?’’ was the man’s reply. 

Norton had not thought of this. He decided to 
be his own inspiration. The process was repeated 
again and again, for once a person has contracted 


168 THE ART ‘OR TELPING PEOPLE 


the habit of depending upon others for advice, he 
is not likely to break himself of it in a week, nor 
yet in a month. 

This is not to imply that to give advice, and, 
when possible, to provide inspiration is not a 
legitimate and important form of helpfulness. To 
establish a principle of never doing this would be 
as unwise as always to supply it whenever it was 
asked. There is, however, a place beyond which 
one cannot go. This is where one finds the burden 
of decisions resting upon himself instead of — 
where it belongs — upon the person who is striv- 
ing to make a better adjustment to life. 

Sickness and physical handicap are perhaps 
the most difficult circumstances in which to tell 
whether or not—and to what extent — one 
should carry the responsibility of the individual 
in trouble. It is not so much in the acute illnesses 
that this question arises, for the man who is in the 
midst of one of these attacks obviously is capable 
of no exertion other than that involved in the will 
to recover. It is rather during convalescence, in 
chronic handicaps, or in minor indispositions that 
the issue develops. 

In such situations the patient frequently be- 
lieves that he is unable to undertake any of the 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 169 


usual activities of life and is in constant fear of 
what may happen to him if he attempts them. 
This caution is well founded. Any one whose 
vitality has been drained by disease or who has 
suffered the results of too early a return to work 
knows how justifiable and significant is the in- 
clination to continue the period of incapacity. 
During illness the patient’s willingness to abandon 
his ordinary tasks is often the measure of his 
chances of recovery; but not always. Sometimes 
the feeling of incapacity and the fear of effort may 
prevent a man from realizing that he is no longer 
ill or from appreciating that even in the presence 
of certain kinds of handicap a useful and interest- 
ing life can be lived. How many persons with 
weak hearts have betaken themselves to an un- 
happy invalidism despite the experience of those 
who in the same condition have been able to ful- 
fill the ordinary demands of business. The belief 
that an individual who has had tuberculosis 1s 
stopped from any but that elusive occupation 
known as light outdoor work has become ‘so 
firmly embedded in the minds of people that a 
physician will often have the greatest difficulty in 
convincing his patient that he can work eight 
hours a day in a great variety of employments. 


170 THE ART OR HELPING IPEOPER 


The tendency here and in like situations is toward 
a construing of the physician’s diagnosis of dis- 
ease in terms of an abandonment of effort, when 
what he intends is a more reasoned and a more in- 
telligent activity. 

This tendency is encouraged by the attitude of 
the friends of the convalescent or handicapped 
person. Out of a mistaken chivalry and in their 
desire to help they frequently confirm him in the 
feeling that he is not equal to the ordinary exi- 
gencies of life. This was what made a beggar of 
Harold Griffin. At the end of his last year in 
grammar school he met with an accident which 
necessitated the amputation of one of his legs. 
On regaining his strength he decided to go to 
work; but instead of aiding him to realize his 
plan, those from whom he sought employment 
expressed their sympathy by offering him money, 
until at length the boy decided that people did not 
expect him to support himself, and for four years 
he relied upon this kind of misdirected gener- 
osity. 

IlIness can become a habit. The longer a person 
is led to think of himself as an invalid the greater 
is the temptation to continue in this state of mind. 
He becomes confirmed in the feeling that he is too 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 171 


sick to do things for himself and he becomes will- 
ing that others should carry his burdens. 

Complicating the problem of dealing with 
people who have acquired this habit is the fact 
that often one cannot tell whether the illness is 
real or imagined. Sometimes this unwillingness 
once more to assume the responsibilities of life is 
entirely unconscious. The person who has been 
sick and then convalescent over a number of 
months has during this time been removed from 
the struggle for existence. He has been able to 
think and to plan without translating his thoughts 
and his plans into action. Except for the recovery 
of his health he is likely to have no fixed purpose 
and his attention and his interests scatter. He 
dreams over the things he would like to do, but 
does not point them in any one direction. He 
talks about working but he does not realize that 
he has lost the habit of effort and that there has 
been insidiously developing within him a disin- 
clination to action. 

Even under such circumstances it is possible 
to throw responsibility upon an individual. This 
may be seen in the manner in which a social case 
worker dealt with a man who, after having had 
influenza, complained of not being well enough to 


172 THE ART OF HELPING "PEOPLE 


return to his job. So many people are not strong 
enough to work for months after their apparent 
recovery from this disease that the social worker 
was puzzled about what to do. Finally, after con- 
sultation with a physician and with the man’s 
former employer, she devised a scheme of grad- 
uated employment, beginning with three hours a 
day. The man could not deny his ability to work 
for so brief a period. After he had become accus- 
tomed to this schedule, it was lengthened, until 
at last he was busy eight hours out of twenty-four. 

What added to the difficulty of this man’s 
problem was the presence of financial as well as 
physical disability. During the period that his 
illness had prevented him from working he had 
been dependent for his living upon money which 
had been supplied to him by the social worker. It 
was therefore all the harder for him to overcome 
the temptation to find in his weakness an excuse 
for avoiding effort. For financial assistance, 
while frequently required by the person in 
trouble, is so obvious and so tangible a way of 
having his burdens carried by others that unless 
administered with the utmost wisdom it may 
cause a man to abandon his initiative and the 
exercise of his energies. 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 173 


Most people still need the incentive to accom- 
plishment that springs from economic necessity 
and material wants. How few of us if suddenly 
supplied with money enough to provide for these 
things would continue to work with the same con- 
centration. Unless already in the grip of some 
dynamic interest we would probably follow the 
example of Jacob Wesley. 

Wesley had completed a course in mechanical 
engineering and was about to start upon his career 
when he received a legacy involving an annual 
income of two thousand dollars. This took from 
work its imperative immediacy and he found one 
good reason after another for postponing action. 
First, it was a trip to Europe to complete his edu- 
cation, then it was a visit to some relatives, and 
after this it was the difficulty of finding just the 
right sort of an opening. When at last he took a 
job he could not forget that he was not obliged to 
work. This prevented him from developing an in- 
terest in his occupation and he soon left it. After 
a period of idleness he obtained another job 
which after a brief trial he abandoned. He 
drifted about here and there without culti- 
vating his abilities. 

_Then an industrial aepreesien took his income 


174 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


from him. His necessity might now quite possibly 
have been the making of him had not an aunt in- 
terfered. She felt so sorry for him that she gave 
him money upon which to live while seeking work. 
It was only a few hundred dollars, but it made a 
virtue of procrastination. When the money had 
been spent, Wesley did not find it difficult to sug- 
gest that he required a little more time to settle 
his affairs. Soon his aunt had grown as accus- 
tomed to giving as he to asking, and the oppor- 
tunity to make a man of himself had passed. 

Essentially there is no difference between the 
loss in initiative and the sense of responsibility 
which Wesley suffered and the dependence and 
beggary brought about in the boy who, on seeking 
a job after the amputation of his leg, received 
gifts of money instead of employment. The boy 
was seduced by dimes and quarters and Wesley 
by checks and banknotes, but the result was the 
same. 

Dependence induced in this way is more com- 
plete and more demoralizing than that occasioned 
by any other form of reliance upon others. This 
is because money is vastly more than a medium of 
exchange. It is the symbol and the trophy of 
man’s struggle for existence. It is the measure 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 175 


of his ability to provide for himself and his family. 
The instinct of self-preservation has made it the 
first, the most primitive, and the most widely 
recognized criterion of success— witness the sat- 
isfaction with which a wage-earner will remark 
as he looks back over the years, ‘‘I’ve always 
been able to support my family,” or the manner 
in which a worker, now come upon hard times, 
will exclaim by way of describing past achieve- 
ments, ‘“‘ Those were the days when I had money 
in my pocket.” 

Correspondingly great is the humiliation of the 
man who is obliged to confess his failure to meet 
this age-old test of manhood by taking as a gift 
the livelihood that other men are earning for 
themselves. It matters not whether the amount 
of money involved be great or small. His self- 
respect has been invaded. He has been obliged to 
yield his independence, and in its place there often 
comes a feeling of futility and of inferiority. He 
ceases trying to do things for himself and weakly 
allows others to carry his burdens. 

When financial difficulties appear as part of a 
man’s trouble, every possible measure should be 
taken to make it unnecessary for him to accept 
money as a gift. Perhaps he can be aided to find 


176 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


more remunerative employment. Perhaps a wiser 
household management will fit his present re- 
sources to his needs. Perhaps he can call still 
further upon his credit. Every conceivable re- 
source which a man may have should be developed 
in the hope that by capitalizing past or future 
productivity he may succeed in meeting the 
crisis in his finances. | 

If his assets are not sufficient to his necessity 
and financial assistance is inevitable, then money 
should be given to him in such a way as to stimu- 
late his sense of responsibility. This can be done 
through a careful selection of the source from 
which help comes to ‘him. It should, if possible, 
suggest the idea of reciprocity. Thus, assistance 
from a member of the same family or from a 
friend, for whom in a similar situation he might 
conceivably perform a similar service, is better 
than aid from a stranger or from some one whose 
financial status is such as to render remote the 
possibility of his needing help. Aid from an em- 
ployer contains the element of reciprocity, for 
there is, on the one hand, a growing public opinion 
that the employee contributes to industry more 
than the amount of his wages, and, on the other, 
the hope of the employee that in the future he 


CULTIVATION OF RESPONSIBILITY 177 


may be able to make return in more effective 
work. Money received from the union or the 
church or the lodge to which an individual be- 
longs has the virtue of appearing as a prerogative 
of his membership. On previous occasions his 
dues or his contributions may have gone to aid 
others. Now it is his turn. Perhaps later on he 
will once more be able to help some fellow mem- 
ber. 

What the conception of reciprocity may do to 
foster the individual’s sense of responsibility can 
be supplemented by expecting accomplishment of 
him in return for the money he receives. Finan- 
cial assistance should always be supplied as part 
of a definite plan toward the execution of which 
the person in trouble must work. If he is sick, 
the goal may be his restoration to health. If he is 
out of work, it may be employment. If the indi- 
vidual in need of assistance is a mother, then the 
plan may center about the education of her chil- 
dren. The more definite the undertaking and the 
greater the emphasis upon what the person who is 
receiving help must do, the better are the chances 
of safeguarding his initiative and his self-respect. 

Whenever the gift of money is necessary, this 
is the spirit in which it should be given, the same 


178) THE,ARY OP HELPING REOEEE 


spirit in which every approach to people in trouble 
should be made, whether the assistance be finan- 
cial or inspirational. Only thus can one prevent 
what one does for a man from becoming a tempta- 
tion to him to allow his burden to be carried by 
others. To insist that he do his own thinking and 
that he act for himself is indispensable to his re- 
habilitation. It is the best way of showing re- 
spect for his ability and confidence in him, and 
this in turn has the effect of quickening his own 
confidence in himself. What we expect of an in- 
dividual determines in large measure what he 
does. Give him responsibility, and he will de- 
velop in self-reliance and self-dependence. 


CHAPTER XII 
MOTIVATION 


I know a very pretty instance of a little girl of whom her father 
was very fond, who once when he was in a melancholy fit, and had 
gone to bed, persuaded him to rise in good humor by saying, ‘“‘ My 
dear papa, please to get up, and let me help you on with your 
clothes, that I may learn to do it when you are an old man.” 
(JAMES BOSWELL, in the Life of Samuel Johnson.) 


A CERTAIN elderly gentleman was discovered by 
his relatives to be living a hermit’s life on the top 
floor of a cheap and wretched rooming house. He 
was a university graduate, a person of taste and 
refinement, who had traveled widely and had been 
accustomed to wealth. Domestic troubles had 
left him without a home and he had drifted hither 
and thither as circumstance directed, until at last 
he had reached his present miserable quarters. 
Here for three winters he had occupied two 
rooms which were without means of heating. He 
had furnished them —if it could be said that 
they were furnished — with the odds and ends 
that remained from the days when he had had a 
house of his own. The bed clothing consisted of a 
thin and ragged quilt. There were neither rugs 
nor carpet on the floor, and despite his retention 


180 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


of habits of personal neatness, there was dust and 
dirt everywhere, even vermin. 

Gradually he had become isolated from inter- 
course with his kind. He went out less and less, 
and began to depend for his food upon sand- 
wiches and fruit which a neighbor’s boy brought 
to him. The paper bags in which his lunches had 
been carried formed a considerable part of the 
rubbish with which his room was littered. He 
was beset with aches and pains of many sorts, 
chiefly the result of this irregular way of living, 
and he was wretchedly unhappy. He spent the 
hours worrying about his present and his future, 
and regretting his past. 

A social worker was asked to help him to move 
to an environment where he would be comfortable 
and where he would find friends, but when it 
came to the point, the old gentleman could not 
make up his mind to go. He was well acquainted 
with the facts of his situation. He knew what it 
would mean to pass another winter in unheated 
rooms. He was miserable in his loneliness and 
in the barrenness and the inconvenience of his 
quarters. He had none of the attachment for 
them that age frequently has for its home. He 
wanted to escape from the wretchedness of his 


MOTIVATION 181 


present condition, but his desire to move was not 
strong enough to decide him in favor of a change. 

It was to the quickening of this desire that the 
social worker addressed himself. Having dis- 
covered a possible boarding-house, he suggested 
that the old man go with him to inspect it, for 
there is nothing more effective in bringing an in- 
dividual to a decision than the presentation of a 
concrete proposition which must be either ac- 
cepted or refused. 

The social worker set forth the arguments in 
favor of the new living place: its location in a 
suburb which was within a single fare by electric 
car of the center of the city, so that visits to town 
would be easy and cheap; the beauty of its sur- 
roundings, especially as contrasted with the 
neighborhood in which the old gentleman was 
now living; the convenience of the room that was 
to be had for rent, and the charming view from 
its windows; the advantage of being able to eat 
and sleep under the same roof, the regular living 
which this would make possible, and the influence 
it would have in restoring his health; the quiet- 
ness of the place — there would be only three 
or four other boarders; and the pleasant character 
of the woman in charge, a registered nurse who 


182 THE ART OF ‘HELPING’ PEOPLE 


would be able to take care of him when he was not 
feeling well. Why not at least go'to look at the 
house? 

The old gentleman feared that it was beyond 
his means. He was assured that the allowance 
which he received from his relatives would am- 
ply provide for this. Suppose that the allowance 
should stop? In reply he was told that his rela- 
tives had pledged themselves to his support, and, 
should by any chance the unforeseen occur, the 
social worker would see to it that he did not suffer 
thereby. 

Then the social worker described how worried 
about him his niece was, and how happy it would 
make her to know that he was comfortable and 
well. The man’s eyes filled with tears, but he 
looked at the furniture about the room and felt 
that he could not move. What was he to do with 
it all? It was like a rope around his neck. 

The social worker promised to undertake 
the moving. He would bring an assistant and 
the old gentleman could sit in a chair and watch 
while they disposed of things as he desired. What 
he did not want to keep could be sold. He could 
move to his new home without any of the worry 
that having these possessions gave him. 


MOTIVATION 183 


And what a terrible thing it was for a man of 
his tastes and his education to be living in this 
way. He should be in the sort of surroundings to 
which he had been accustomed, not in these dis- 
mal quarters. 

Such were the suggestions which the social 
worker advanced to develop within the old gentle- 
man the desire to move to a better environment. 
Back and forth over this ground the conversation 
went, the suggestions being introduced from dif- 
ferent angles. Finally, after a discussion of more 
than two hours, the man promised to think over 
it by himself that night. The next day he called at 
the office of the social worker and said that he had 
decided to move. 

Perhaps the inertia of the old gentleman — he 
said of himself that once he was settled in a place 
he was likely to stay— was unusual, but it 
serves to emphasize a fundamental fact in human 
nature. People may be convinced intellectually 
of the importance of a given course of action, yet 
they may not rally the energy necessary to carry 
it through. The truth of this, as applied to the 
breaking of habits, almost everybody will recog- 
nize. Moderation in eating and in the selection 
of proper foods is universally agreed to be essen- 


184 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


tial, yet hosts of men and women suffer from 
various afflictions and inconveniences because, 
while they realize that they ought to control 
their diet, they cannot bring themselves to do so. 
Those who are victims of the habit of retiring late 
find themselves, day after day, less effective than 
they might be, but although they want more 
sleep and realize the importance of this, they 
seem to be unable to go to bed at an appropriate 
hour. A knowledge of the facts, an appreciation 
of the relation between habits such as these and 
personal inefficiency is seldom alone enough to 
enable an individual to modify his manner of life. 
To overcome his trouble he must want to be free 
of it more than he desires to indulge himself. 
Other things being equal, if his wish to enter upon 
a new régime is strong enough he will change. 
One way of aiding a man in such a situation is 
to reinforce his desire with other desires, to 
strengthen the influence of one motive by appeal- 
ing to supporting motives. It was this which 
caused Tom Haverstraw to go to a sanitarium 
after he had become so suspicious of hospitals and 
other institutions that he had run away from 
several in which he had been staying. Tom was 
suffering from a form of hysteria which had 


MOTIVATION 185 


twisted his arm and neck from their natural posi- 
tions. Among the things prescribed for his cure 
was a regularized life and an environment in 
which he would find quiet and security. This he 
could not obtain at home; yet while he wanted 
to recover, he could not bring himself to leave his 
parents. 

One day he happened to complain about in- 
sommnia. 

“Tf I could only sleep,” he sighed. 

“When I can’t sleep,” said the social case 
worker, “‘I take a vacation and go to the country 
and I soon find that I can sleep.” She then de- 
scribed the restfulness of the fields and woods and 
the quiet of the night. 

‘“My, I wish I could go somewhere like that,’’ 
the boy exclaimed. 

‘You can,’’ the social worker assured him, and 
told him about a sanitarium situated in beautiful 
country where he could find the very peace and 
repose he was seeking. The boy decided to go. 
The wish to recover the use of his neck and arms 
was not enough to cause him to want to leave 
home, but as soon as the hope of recovering from 
insomnia was added to this wish he was ready to 
try the experiment. 


186 THE ART OF HELPING’ PEOPLE 


When he arrived at the institution, the super- 
intendent used another motive as a means of 
strengthening his determination to regain his 
health. A few steps away two boys were shouting 
and running about apparently with every muscle 
and nerve under their command. 

“Jim, Harry,” the superintendent called. 
‘‘Come here a minute, please.” 

The boys came up with leaps and skips. 

‘“‘Boys,’’ asked the superintendent, “were you 
as badly off as Tom, here, when you came to us?” 

‘‘Oh, we were much worse,’’ they replied. 


b] 


‘So you see, Tom,’’ said the superintendent, 
*‘you can get well if you want to. If you really 
want to get well you will.” 

This was both an assurance and a challenge. 
The superintendent was using the age-old sug- 
gestion that “all may do what has by man been 
done.” It was both a means of instilling confi- 
dence in the boy, and an appeal to the spirit of 
competition. 

A typical use of this latter motive was that 
made by a social case worker in encouraging Mrs. 
Dorello to fix up her home. The house was in a 
most dilapidated state. It had not been papered 
for eight years. What paper was left on the walls 


MOTIVATION _ 187 


was hanging in shreds. The paint was smudged 
with the grime of countless dirty fingers, but the 
landlord having no confidence in the capacity of 
the family for taking care of his property refused 
to make any improvements. The mattresses were 
filthy and there were only two sheets that even 
approached serviceability. 

The social worker had tried to help Mrs. Dorello 
to find a better house, but the shortage of dwell- 
ings was so great that this was impossible. 
Knowing that Mrs. Dorello knew what ear- 
nest efforts had been made to secure a better 
home for the family the social worker suggested 
that she try to make the best of the one she had. 
Mr. Dorello was out of the city. Why not sur- 
prise him and welcome him back to a spick and 
span home? Why not try to do over everything 
before he should return? Partly it was the fun of 
surprising her husband and partly the spirit of 
competing against time which stimulated Mrs. 
Dorello’s energy. She tore the remaining paper 
from the walls and whitewashed them. She 
painted the woodwork, washed the mattresses, 
obtained new sheets, and did many other things, 
so that when her husband returned he found a 
new home awaiting him. 


188. THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


To make a game of a task is one of the easiest 
ways of accomplishing it. Parents, in particular, 
appreciate this, as is instanced by such familiar 
expedients in the lives of children as the race to 
get dressed in the morning, or the finishing of this 
or that before the mother or the father comes 
home. Competition against space, or time, or 
one’s self, or somebody else, frequently, if not al- 
ways, underlies the idea of the game. It is an ex- 
ceedingly useful motive if not practiced to excess, 
and if the competition most often called into prac- 
tice is competition against one’s self. 

With some people, the spirit of competition 
really becomes one of combativeness. The surest 
way to rouse their energies to is oppose them, and 
sometimes the best method of stimulating them 
to carry out what they have undertaken is to ad- 
vocate an opposite course. 

A delightful illustration of this is set forth by 
Boswell in his famous description of how he per- 
suaded Dr. Johnson to dine with John Wilkes to 
whom the doctor was violently opposed, Wilkes 
being a strong Whig, while Johnson, of course, 
was a vehement Tory. ‘‘Two men more different 
could perhaps not be selected out of all mankind,”’ 
says Boswell. ‘‘They had even attacked one 


MOTIVATION 189 


another with some asperity in their writings.” 
Indeed, when Boswell suggested to Mr. Edward 
Dilly that he invite Dr. Johnson to his house to 
dine with Mr. Wilkes, Mr. Dilly exclaimed: 

“What! with Mr. Wilkes? Not for the world. 
Dr. Johnson would never forgive me.” 

Boswell, however, undertook to arrange the 
meeting. 

‘Notwithstanding the high veneration which I 
entertained for Dr. Johnson, I was sensible that 
he was sometimes a little actuated by the spirit of 
contradiction, and by means of that I hoped that 
I should gain my point. I was persuaded that if 
I had come upon him with a direct proposal, ‘Sir, 
will you dine in company with Jack Wilkes’ he 
would have flown into a passion, and would 
probably have answered, ‘Dine with Jack Wilkes, 
Sir! I’d as soon dine with Jack Ketch.’ I, there- 
fore, while we were sitting quietly by ourselves at 
his house in an evening, took occasion to open 
my plan thus: — ‘Mr. Dilly, Sir, sends his re- 
spectful compliments to you, and would be happy 
if you would do him the honor to dine with him 
on Wednesday next along with me, as I must soon 
go to Scotland.’ Johnson. ‘Sir, I am obliged to 
Mr. Dilly. I will wait upon him—’ Boswell. 


190 THE ART OP SHELPING: PEOPLE 


‘Provided, Sir, I suppose, that the company which 
he is to have, is agreeable to you.’ Johnson. 
‘What do you mean, Sir? What do you take me 
for? Do you think I am so ignorant of the world, 
as to imagine that I am to prescribe to a gentle- 
man what company he is to have at his table?’ 
Boswell. ‘I beg your pardon, Sir, for wishing to 
prevent you from meeting people whom you might 
not like. Perhaps he may have some of what he 
calls his patriotick friends with him.’ Johnson. 
‘Well, Sir, and what then? What care I for his 
patriotick friends? Poh!’ Boswell. ‘I should not 
be surprised to find Jack Wilkes there.’ Johnson. 
‘And if Jack Wilkes should be there, what is that 
to me, Sir? My dear friend, let me have no more 
of this. I am sorry to be angry with you; but 
really it is treating me strangely to talk to me as if 
I could not meet any company whatever occa- 
sionally.’ Boswell. ‘Pray forgive me, Sir: I meant 
well. But you shall meet whoever comes, for me.’ 
Thus I secured him, and told Dilly that he would 
find him very well pleased to be one of his guests 
on the day appointed.” 

Boswell’s method of motivating Dr. Johnson 
was not unlike the means used to induce a man 
suffering from tuberculosis to enter a sanatorium. 


MOTIVATION I9I 


Argument and persuasion had been tried without 
any effect. Although at bottom the man knew 
that he ought to go his determination to stay 
where he was increased with each suggestion to 
the contrary. Finally the social worker said to him: 

‘‘T’ve tried my best to induce you to go to the 
sanatorium. But since you will not do so, I’m not 
going to try any longer. We'll do the best we can 
to make you comfortable at home and we'll not 
mention the sanatorium any more.” 

When the man found himself with nothing to 
oppose he became less certain about his desire to 
continue in the city, and very shortly he began to 
make plans for going away for treatment. After 
the social case worker had yielded, the man could 
not help feeling, now that he had succeeded in 
having his way, a little ashamed of his perverse- 
ness. 

Pride, and its corollary shame, are among the 
strongest motives to which one can appeal. 

“Why, you’re a slacker, aren’t you?” said a 
social case worker to a boy as he entered her 
office one morning during the war, coughing 
heavily. 

The boy straightened up and took a step for- 
ward almost as if he were about to strike her. 


192 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


“What do you mean?”’ he asked. 

“Tf you let that cough run on, the army won't 
accept you when your turn comes,’ was the 
reply. 

‘When can I go to the doctor?”’ was the boy’s 
almost instant response. He stopped smoking, 
and recovered from his cough. The boy had 
wanted to be rid of his cough, but not until his 
pride had been touched at its most sensitive 
point, his courage, and at a time when courage 
was at a premium, was he willing to make the sac- 
rifice upon which his recovery was contingent. 

““Don’t let the neighbors see you move any- 
thing into the house that isn’t in first-class condi- 
tion,’ urged the social worker upon Mrs. Dorello 
when at last another home had been found. ‘‘ You 
are going into a new neighborhood. Don’t let 
them think that you own anything that is dirty.” 

Mr. and Mrs. Dorello rose immediately to this 
suggestion. They washed the beds and painted 
them; they gilded the frames of their pictures; 
repaired furniture; scoured the pots and pans; and 
disposed of all the odds and ends that were not 
worth saving; and thus were able to make a fresh 
start in keeping house. 

A similar appeal to pride and shame was that 


MOTIVATION 193 


made to a man who, while his wife was ill in a 
hospital, asked: 

‘What about my wife? Must I still stay with 
that woman?” 

‘Would you go and leave her now that she’s 
sick?”’ said the social worker. 

‘‘T don’t like her and I don’t want to stay with 
her.” 

‘Does it mean nothing to you that she is the 
mother of all your children?” was the reply. 
“Think what she has endured to bring them into 
the world and what it has meant to her to take 
care of them. You wouldn’t want people to say, 
‘There goes Hansen. Look at the kind of man he 
is. He just walked off and left his wife and 
family.’ ”’ 

A simple appeal of this sort to a man’s pride is 
obviously not alone enough to solve a problem of 
maladjustment between husband and wife. There 
were many other things that needed to be done, 
but the use of this motive was not without its ef- 
fect, as was also a reference to the welfare of his 
children. 

“Tf you and your wife quarrel, your children 
can’t be happy. You must find a way to be happy 
yourself if you want to have a happy home.” 


194 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


The part which the desire for the welfare of 
others may play in influencing people is illus- 
trated by the story of Mr. and Mrs. Henshaw. 

Mr. Henshaw had been a patient in the Hudson 
Tuberculosis Hospital. It became necessary to 
close the ward in which he was staying, and pre- 
parations for his transfer to another institution 
were made. He, however, decided to return to his 
home. As he was in an advanced stage of the 
disease, this plan would have jeopardized the 
health of the family. The social worker and the 
doctors who had been helping Mr. Henshaw did 
their best to persuade him to enter the other 
hospital. Finally, when he refused, they threat- 
ened to invoke the aid of the law permitting the 
compulsory removal of tuberculous patients from 
their homes. Mr. Henshaw responded by fall- 
ing into a tremendous fury and leaving the ward. 
When the social worker called at his home, he re- 
fused her admission. Both he and his wife were 
enraged. Those who knew Mr. and Mrs. Hen- 
shaw said that they were stubborn, impossible 
people. 

Another social case worker then undertook to 
change the attitude of Mr. and Mrs. Henshaw and 
to induce Mr. Henshaw to enter a sanatorium. 


MOTIVATION 195 


Mrs. Henshaw received her. 

“How are things going?’’ the visitor asked. 

The only response was a shrug of the shoulders. 

“‘Not very well?” suggested the social worker. 

“‘No; how could they go well?”’ replied Mrs. 
Henshaw in a moody and aggrieved tone of voice. 
“‘My husband is no better, the damp weather has 
a depressing effect upon him. He has been in bed 
most of the week.”’ 

‘‘What are you planning to do for him?” 

“‘He is to stay at home,”’ replied Mrs. Henshaw. 
“‘T know that I can take care of him.’ She then 
burst into a torrent of feeling. ‘‘He has been in 
the Hudson Hospital all winter and is no better. 
The doctors have done him no good. When he 
wanted to leave, they threatened him with the 
law. If he could have gone to Mount Huron last 
summer as I wanted, he would be all right now. 
It is the one place away from home where he 
would be happy. I don’t see why you won’t send 
him there.”’ 

“Do you believe he has tuberculosis?” 

“I know he has,’”’ admitted Mrs. Henshaw. 

She had never been willing to acknowledge this 
before. It was for this reason that the social case 
worker had asked the question. Had she told 


‘196 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


Mrs. Henshaw that her husband had tubercu- 
losis, the statement would probably have been 
hotly contradicted. By this method of approach 
the social worker had avoided an issue. 

“There is no sanatorium at Mount Huron,” 
she now explained, ‘‘and there is no other place 
there where a person with consumption can go.” 

“Well, if he can’t go to Mount Huron,”’ re- 
turned Mrs. Henshaw, ‘“‘he won’t go to the Mercy 
Hospital’? — this being the institution to which 
the doctors had tried to induce Mr. Henshaw to go. 

Having learned Mrs. Henshaw’s plan and hav- 
ing by inference at least obtained from her the 
recognition of its impossibility, the social worker 
began to prepare the way for inducing Mrs. Hen- 
shaw to encourage her husband to enter an insti- 
tution. 

. ‘What about the children?” she began. ‘Are 
you going to risk exposing them to tuberculosis? 
You wouldn’t expose them to measles or scarlet 
fever, and tuberculosis is a much more dangerous 
disease.”’ 

‘“That’s not true,” exclaimed Mrs. Henshaw, 
raising her voice. ‘‘He’s no more a danger than 
the other patients, and the hospital discharged 
them without asking any questions.” 


MOTIVATION 197 


Evidently this was not a good start. With 
some women the argument of the welfare of their 
_ children is unanswerable. With others, the welfare 
of the husband comes first. Mrs. Henshaw had in 
spirit suffered all the pain and discomfort that 
Mr. Henshaw had experienced. 

‘Wouldn’t you like your husband to get away 
from the city before the hot weather?’’ was the 
next suggestion. ‘‘He now has a middle room with 
very little air, and he might be in a place where he 
would not feel the heat so much. Wouldn’t you 
like something of that sort for him?”’ | 

“Yes, I would,’”’ Mrs. Henshaw admitted. 

“Do you think he would consider the Lake- 
view Sanatorium?’’ — a pleasant institution near 
the country which would be favorably known to 
Mrs. Henshaw. To have suggested the Mercy 
Hospital would have been merely to arouse old 
antagonisms, and by asking Mrs. Henshaw’s ad- 
vice in this way the social worker was in a sense 
making her a partner in the effort to persuade 
Mr. Henshaw. 

“T’ll talk to him about it,’’ Mrs. Henshaw re- 
plied. 

At this point the man appeared and said that 
he wanted to go to Mount Huron. 


198 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


Mrs. Henshaw answered for the social worker. 

“You can’t go because of your TB.” 

‘‘But wouldn’t you like to go to the Lake- 
view Sanatorium?” the social worker suggested. 
‘“‘Mrs. Henshaw and I have been talking it 
over.” 

‘“‘T guess it’s the next best place,’’ Mrs. Hen- 
shaw said. 

While the conversation was far more devious 
and prolonged than these quotations indicate, 
this remark clinched the matter, and before the 
social worker left, Mr. Henshaw had signed the 
application for his admission to the sanatorium 
where ten days later he was comfortably es- 
tablished. 

If in a situation of this sort one is known and 
liked by the individual in trouble there fre- 
quently comes the temptation to make a personal 
appeal to him: ‘‘Do this because I want it.” 
Nothing is weaker, less constructive and less 
permanent. The contact between helper and 
helped usually is temporary. Remove the person- 
ality of the one who makes this plea and the 
reason for the course of conduct which he urges is 
likely also to disappear. This objection obviously 
does not hold where, as in the interview with the 


MOTIVATION 199 


old gentleman described at the beginning of the 
chapter, the motive appealed to is that of making 
happy some one with whom there is a continuing 
relationship. The social worker was justified in em- 
phasizing the wish of the old gentleman’s niece 
that he move to more comfortable quarters. 
The tie between the two had always existed and 
would endure as long as life lasted. To please her 
would be a constant source of pleasure to himself, 
but for him to have acquiesced for no other reason 
than because he recognized the well-intentioned 
earnestness of the social worker would have been 
a scant guarantee of his holding to the plan that 
had been proposed. Personality, in the sense of 
the unconscious attraction which one human being 
exercises over another, must almost inevitably 
be a factor in motivation, but it should seldom, 
if ever, be deliberately used to influence deci- 
sions. 

Often that which prevents people from entering 
institutions is the fear of the unknown. One way 
of overcoming such a difficulty is to suggest a 
visit to the hospital or the home in question. See- 
ing the place gives it a concreteness and definite- 
ness that clears away the disturbing element of 
vagueness and uncertainty. Its inherent attrac- 


200 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


tiveness both allays fear and provides an addi- 
tional reason for seeking admission. 

As a positive stimulus fear is one of the strong- 
est of motives. It is responsible for many success- 
ful careers, careers that have found their genesis 
in the very fear that they would not be successful. 
The fear of what people might say, the fear of con- 
sequences has been a stabilizing force in count- 
less lives and many a boy and girl brought up in 
country, village, or town has learned the begin- 
nings of foresight and thrift through the haunting 
fear of the poorhouse. 

Powerful though this motive is the use of it is 
the least desirable of all the ways of influencing 
individuals. Back of an appeal to it usually is the 
implication of force, and to apply force, as pointed 
out in Chapter X, is generally to confess a lack of 
skill and understanding. The use of all other 
motives partakes in greater or less degree of the 
nature of inspiration. To arouse fear is to com- 
mand. The appeal to most motives leaves a man 
free to choose. It is a form of leadership. Fear 
drives. 

Reward is a far sounder method of reinforcing 
an individual’s desires. Lacking the same com- 
pulsory element, it can be used with greater justi- 


MOTIVATION 201 


fication. Obviously, opportunity for increased in- 
come is a more satisfactory way of developing a 
man’s industrial efficiency than is the threat of 
the loss of his job. Interesting the individual in 
the task itself, work for the sake of work, would 
be still more constructive. 

The influencing of a person through an appeal 
to his desires is seldom so clear cut and direct a 
process as the illustrations thus far would per- 
haps indicate. Actually, the shortest interview 
may involve calling upon such a variety of mo- 
tives as to make it hard to classify them. While 
a knowledge and an understanding of the individ- 
ual in need of help will usually indicate the appeal 
that may be most effective, one must frequently 
rely upon trial and error, stimulating this desire 
and that, until success is achieved. Often, as with 
the encouraging of the old gentleman to move to 
the suburbs, it is impossible to tell what motive 
has been decisive. Seldom is a man influenced by 
any one thing. Usually he is moved by a com- 
plexity of considerations. The part of the person 
who would help him is to make sure that all appro- 
priate suggestions have been presented and that 
he has had the opportunity which the motives 
carry with them, an opportunity of the greatest 


202 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


potentiality; for under the influence of a quick- 
ened desire men have frequently accomplished — 
are, indeed, constantly accomplishing — tasks to 
which otherwise they would have never dreamed 
themselves to be equal. 


CHAPTER XIII 
DYNAMICS 


And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, 
and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon 
a rock, (Matthew vu, 25.) 


She had an understanding with the years; 

For always in her eyes there was a light 

As though she kept a secret none might guess 

Some confidence that time had made her heart. 

So calmly did she bear the weight of pain, 

With such serenity accept the joy, 

It seemed she had a mother love for life, 

And all the days were children at her breast. 
SCUDDER MIDDLETON 


POWERFUL though motivation is in stimulating 
men to action there are other forces that are even 
stronger. The marshalling of an individual’s de- 
sires is in a sense a preliminary process. It starts 
him upon a given course of conduct. It isa means 
of focusing his initiative upon a specific and fre- 
quently an instant occasion, — helping him to de- 
cide to consult a physician, to enter an institution, 
to apply for a job, or to embark upon some other 
definite task. Usually its chief value is in its im- 
mediacy. 

There are sources of strength that are more 
lasting, sources of power within the man himself 


204. THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


and in the world about him, dynamics which are 
continually being used by people to raise the level 
of their energies and to cause them to flow surely 
and steadily through the channels into which they 
have been directed. 

What is more familiar than such testimony as 
that of Mrs. Hearne who had been obliged to 
make the adjustment to widowhood under cir- 
cumstances of peculiar difficulty. 

‘I could not have gone through with it,’’ she 
said, “if it had not been for my faith.” 

Commonplace, also, are experiences like that 
of Herbert Worth, who, without family or kin to 
help him with affection and sympathy, found in 
his religion the courage to face the slow advance 
of cancer, or that of Wilson Kirk, who having 
given himself over to dissipation was converted 
at a gospel mission and completely reorganized his 
life, devoting the remainder of it to his church and 
to his family. 

Here was a force that not only provided an 
initial impulse but also continued for many years 
to be a source of renewal and strength. In each 
of these persons it manifested itself differently but 
in all it was an inspiring and sustaining power. 

Centuries of human experience have given 


DYNAMICS | 205 


similar testimony to the dynamic qualities of 
religion. Again and again it is the decisive factor 
in enabling an individual to overcome his difficul- 
ties. Religion shows itself differently in different 
persons. To one it appears suddenly as in con- 
version; to another it comes as the growth of a 
slowly developing conviction. One man receives 
it through one form of faith, another through 
another form. This complicates the problem of 
using it, for the person who is in need of help may 
require an interpretation of religion different from 
that offered by the person who desires to help 
him. Yet so personal a thing is religion that one 
can express it only as he perceives it. He can give 
only his own interpretation of religion. This may, 
indeed, be the wisest thing to do. Often, however, 
it will happen that the man in trouble already has 
an approach to religion, one which perhaps may 
have been little used but which if developed might 
mean much to him. The best procedure with such 
a person is to bring him into touch with some one 
who has this same approach and who may be able 
to confirm him in it. 

There is a valuable suggestion in the practice 
of social case workers in non-sectarian organiza- 
tions. Their effort always is to strengthen what- 


206 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


ever relationship may exist between a man and 
the institutionalized expression of the faith which 
he professes. While this practice is partially the 
result of a desire not to break denominational 
bounds it also rests upon the sound principle that 
in a time of distress an individual will be most 
likely to want to turn to the spiritual bases upon 
which in the past, even though remote, he may 
have begun to build. 

This means more than merely telling a man 
that he ought to attend church or synagogue. It 
means bringing him into touch with some other 
human being, whether priest, social worker, or 
layman, who understands how best to wees 
his faith in him. 

This principle was put into ideal practice by 
the social case worker who opened the way to a 
more intimate relationship of a man with his 
church by helping him to move his family into a 
house next to one occupied by a devoted and ac- 
tive member of the same denomination. Telling 
him that he ought to go to church would have had 
little effect. It was through the life with his 
neighbor that he was brought to see the value of 
religion so that he once more attended services 
and experienced a quickening of his faith. The 


DYNAMICS 207 


social worker who was instrumental in bringing 
this about subscribed to a creed that was different 
in many respects from that of her client, but she 
believed in the dynamic qualities of religion and 
therefore helped to strengthen him in those spir- 
itual beliefs which seemed to make the greatest 
appeal to him. However religion expresses itself, 
it is the most vital thing in the life of the individ- 
ual in whom it exists, the primary source of in- 
spiration and anchorage, the influence that sus- 
tains and steadies him in every adjustment that 
he must make. 

Wholly different in influence and character 
from religion was the dynamic utilized in arous- 
ing Margaret Seip, a woman of fifty, from the in- 
trospective state into which she had fallen. Miss 
Seip and her mother had been living together in 
two rooms with so little to do and such a barren- 
ness of happenings that for lack of a better occu- 
pation they spent their days in telling each other 
about the miserable condition of their health. 
What they needed was a new subject for thought, 
something that would break the monotony with 
which they were surrounded. This was supplied 
when the daughter was placed at work in an arts 
and crafts shop. The comings and goings of the 


208 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


customers, the sight of new things, the conversa- 
tion of the other employees gave the woman an 
excitement and an interest that she carried home 
with her at the end of the day for the vicarious 
enjoyment of her mother. ‘I didn’t know people 
could talk about such cheerful things,”’ she said in 
appreciation of what her work meant to her. 

She had profited by what might be called the dy- 
namic of adventure. Adventure, change, variety, 
new experience help to maintain an individual’s 
alertness and to quicken his zest for living. It is 
frequently as much this as the physical advantage 
of climate that physicians have in mind when they 
prescribe the mountains or the seashore for a 
convalescing patient. It is what many people 
derive from travel. The woman who mastered a 
fit of depression by rearranging her furniture and 
giving a fresh aspect to her home was making 
excellent use of this dynamic of adventure and 
change. 

Adventure has a contribution to make to the 
life of every human being. Depending as it does, 
however, upon variety and change it has not the 
substantial qualities of some of the other dy- 
namics. It is a relish that usually needs to be 
accompanied or followed by meat. It was this 


DYNAMICS 209 


sort of sequence that enabled Tony Patrello 
successfully to make the adjustment to adoles- 
cence. In the years that immediately succeeded 
his father’s death he had been drifting farther and 
farther away from the influence of his home. At 
thirteen years of age he preferred the manners and 
habits of the street to those which his mother 
urged upon him. He was a frequent truant from 
school and a leader of a group of boys whose 
deviltries in the neighborhood threatened soon to 
bring them before the juvenile court. No appeal 
seemed to have any effect upon him. 

One morning a social case worker happened to 
see Tony take his father’s violin down from the 
wall. She asked him whether he would like to 
learn to play upon it. He thought that perhaps he 
would. Lessons at a neighboring settlement were 
arranged for immediately. It was a new experi- 
ence and for nearly a month Tony was engrossed 
in it. He spent all his spare moments in practice 
and measured time by the intervals between his les- 
sons. His attendance at school became regular, 
for the social worker had conditioned his instruc- 
tion in music upon this, and he began to devote to 
his violin the leisure that had been wasted on the 
street. The dynamic of adventure possessed him 


210) THE ART OFF HEEPING PEOPEE 


and became the means of turning the stream of 
his energy into useful channels. 

Then came a period when the newness wore off. 
Tony showed signs of slipping back to the old life. 
It now required all the ingenuity of the social 
worker to stimulate his desire to master the violin. 
Every conceivable motive was utilized until 
finally the boy reached the point of being able to 
make music, not by any means the music of a 
master but music that was appreciated as such by 
the other members of the family and of course by 
Tony, himself. The satisfaction that he derived 
from this accomplishment had a profound effect 
upon him. It took him altogether away from the 
street. His music began to develop in him new 
habits of behavior. It brought him new friends, 
and it strengthened the whole tone of his life. The 
sense of achievement he derived from being able to 
play upon the violin filled him with the ambition 
for achievement in other directions, and first in 
education and later in work he attained to one 
success after another. What the sense of adven- 
ture had begun the sense of achievement carried on. 

Achievement is one of the most stimulating of 
life’s experiences. The sense of power and of 
confidence which it brings strengthens one for 


DYNAMICS 211 


further accomplishment. Look tothe man who is 
listless or timorous or in despair and one is likely 
to find that he has nothing from which he can 
win for himself the feeling of success. And yet the 
opportunity for achievement is neither remote nor 
unusually difficult to find. It is often to be derived 
from the simplest and the homeliest things. To 
most bookkeepers there is no thrill like that 
which follows the striking of a balance at the first 
trial, unless it be that of eliminating the discrepant 
penny after hours of search. One woman enjoys a 
great sense of achievement as she looks at the 
garden she has just cleared of weeds. Another 
woman finds nothing that quite equals the sat- 
isfaction of a triple row of glasses of preserves, 
the product of a morning over the stove. One 
person obtains a sense of achievement from a piece 
of carpentry; another in polishing the household 
brass; a third in a well-played game of bridge. To 
reach the office and clear the desk of mail before 
the rest of the staff arrive is an exhilaration to 
many a business man who finds his whole day 
made more effective by this initial accomplish- 
ment. The sense of achievement may lie in the 
writing of a letter, or the making of a speech, or 
the vicarious success that is had through the 


212 THE ART OF. HELPING PEOPLE 


accomplishment of a son or a daughter or a pupil. 
It may come in as many different ways as there 
are people. Always it is an influence for strength. 
Achievement begets achievement. The conscious- 
ness of success charges a man’s energies to higher 
levels of effort and often what otherwise would 
have been impossible is attained. 

While frequently the finding of the means by 
which an individual can derive a sense of achieve- 
ment is a process of trial and error, involving the 
suggesting of this and then that until the appro- 
priate medium has been discovered, it is obvious 
that the more intimately one knows a man the 
more likely will one be to select the thing that will 
attract him. Usually to learn what has given him 
a feeling of accomplishment in the past is to 
find what will satisfy him in his present diffi- 
culty. 

A woman who was friendless, unhappy, and un- 
stable consulted a social case worker. She had no 
pleasure in her work asseamstress. She was asked 
whether she had ever tried anything else. Yes, 
she had. She had been a cook, a lady’s maid, a 
clerk in a store, and an operator in a factory. In 
none of these employments had she remained 
longer than a few months. Before her experience 


DYNAMICS 213 


with them she had been a teacher of Spanish. For 
the first time during the conversation she showed 
enthusiasm. Evidently this was an occupation in 
which she had found self-expression. It developed 
that she had been an able teacher but that she was 
not the sort of person to work coéperatively with 
other people in an organization. She had been 
obliged to leave several schools and had thought 
that teaching was closed to her. The social 
worker found some private pupils for the woman. 
The experiment was successful. At the end of a 
year the teacher’s clients had increased in number, 
and she was a more stable person than she had 
ever been. 

Sometimes it is impossible, perhaps even un- 
necessary, to arrange for a change in an individ- 
ual’s employment. The task is rather to help 
him to see that what he is doing is important and 
that he is doing it well. Every craftsman no 
matter how sure he may be of his art is dependent 
upon the appraisal of his work by those whom he 
regards ascompetent critics. It is not unusual for 
a person to have a feeling of failure changed to one 
of achievement when what he thought to be un- 
successful is received with appreciation. The 
admiration which a social worker expressed for 


214 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


the needlework of a woman who felt that her edu- 
cation was wasted in this occupation was the 
means of giving her a new sense of accomplish- 
ment. To realize that some one whose opinion 
she respected recognized something unusual in her 
product and brought other people to see this also 
was enough to develop in her a much needed 
satisfaction and content. 

Quite as influential as achievement in develop- 
ing an individual’s energies is the purposeful effort 
he makes in order to attain to success. Few things 
are more effective in enabling a man to overcome 
his difficulties. To have a goal toward which to 
work both quickens and steadies him. The win- 
ning of the great war was a means of re-creating 
for a time at least thousands of unhappy lives. 
For four years they had a cause so vital and so 
important that it gave new meaning to existence 
and new strength to being. The determination to 
obtain an education or to recover one’s health or 
to pay one’s debts or to build a business or to 
develop an invention or to accomplish any other 
ambition has a buoying and sustaining influence 
upon an individual’s energies. If it is but one of a 
number of factors in his life and is not allowed to 
remain single in his mind and to occupy him to the 


DYNAMICS 215 


exclusion of all else it can make him more vigorous 
in everything he does. 

What the having of a purpose can accomplish 
for an individual is illustrated by the story of Mrs. 
Quinn. 

Mrs. Quinn presented a paradox in that she 
loved her children and at the same time neglected 
them. For that matter she neglected herself. 
Neither their clothing nor hers was ever clean, and 
she allowed the house to become as unkempt as its 
tenants. She was an evasive person. It was easier 
for her to lie than to tell the truth, and she was 
rapidly teaching her children, both directly and by 
example, this method of approaching life. Yet 
she was gentle and affectionate with them and it 
was evident — at least to the social case worker 
— that any better ordering of Mrs. Quinn’s life 
would come about through her devotion to the 
children. 

Every attempt to use their welfare as a means 
of influencing her failed. Then came a crisis in 
Mrs. Quinn’s affairs. One morning she called to 
see the social worker with the news that she had 
given up her home and had rented two furnished 
rooms to which she intended to move the family. 
The truth was that she had equipped the house 


216 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


in which she had been living by purchases from 
an installment company. She had failed in her 
payments, and the company had removed every 
piece of furniture from her home. Hitherto she 
had always insisted that the furniture was her 
own. 

Mrs. Quinn had expected that the social worker 
would come to the rescue as she had on many an- 
other occasion. The social worker, however, saw 
in the woman’s predicament an opportunity to 
help her to make a change in her way of life. In- 
stead of offering the financial assistance that 
would have removed the immediate difficulty she 
agreed to the plan that Mrs. Quinn had suggested. 
Obviously, a family of seven ought not to live in 
two furnished rooms and it would be necessary to 
make provision elsewhere — either in an insti- 
tution or in a private home — for at least three of 
the children. Mrs. Quinn was heart-broken. To 
be separated from her children was more than she 
could bear. She was told that there was a way by 
which she could reunite her family. All she need 
do was to demonstrate that she was a fit mother 
for them. Let her prove her ability to take proper 
care of the remaining children. Let her endeavor 
to train them to be truthful instead of setting 


DYNAMICS 217 


them an opposite example, and the social worker 
would help her to reunite her household. 

The change which took place in Mrs. Quinn was 
almost immediate. In two weeks her clothes and 
person were clean and she had made a beginning 
of furbishing her rooms. The habit of lying was 
not so easily broken, but she now attempted to 
meet life squarely. At the end of three months, 
the social worker felt that enough progress had 
been made to justify her in reéstablishing Mrs. 
Quinn in a house, but instead of returning all the 
children to her immediately, she arranged to have 
them restored, one at a time. Thus each child 
which Mrs. Quinn won back was an incentive to 
her to work the harder to make of herself the sort 
of mother she ought to be, and by the time the 
family was reunited, Mrs. Quinn had begun to 
prefer cleanliness for its own sake and to see that 
it was possible to be happy and still tell the truth. 

Undoubtedly, the personality and influence of 
the social worker had much to do with this change, 
but what started it and gave it impetus was Mrs. 
Quinn’s determination to win back her children. 
The real skill of the social worker lay in her per- 
ception that out of the crisis that had come into 
Mrs. Quinn’s life a goal for her activities might be 


2r3 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


devised. There is no better place to look for the 
fabric of a purpose than at the very heart of an 
individual’s difficulties. 

What gave additional strength to the ordinary 
powers of this dynamic was its genesis in Mrs. 
Quinn’s affection for her children. That she was 
devoted to them made her purpose to regain them 
the greater, while the struggle to bring them back 
to her increased her love for them. They were the 
principle medium through which her emotional 
life expressed itself. 

Emotional expression when it has, as here, a 
satisfactory channel can be one of the most steady- 
ing and inspiring of influences. It finds its outlets 
variously, through appreciation of nature and of 
art, and through every phase of human association, 
acquaintanceship, friendship, courtship, marriage, 
parenthood, family life. It isin human association 
that it reaches its highest values, for here there is 
the element of response, the possibility of that 
reciprocity of affection that can bring security and 
satisfaction. Such emotional expression is not a 
thing to be sought. It is suspicious of invitations 
and it comes unbidden. It is a mutual experience, 
a harmony of free and understanding personalities. 

One can introduce the lonely individual to 


DYNAMICS 219 


human association. One can take him where there 
are people who might become his friends, but un- 
less he is clear of confining inhibitions and reser- 
vations his efforts at emotional expression will be 
fruitless and unsatisfying. While it is true that 
it is largely through emotional expression that 
personality finds its release, nevertheless, a 
measure of preparation for this experience is 
possible. Certainly this applied to the solution of 
Lydia Easton’s difficulties. 

Lydia had had an unsettled and an unsatis- 
factory childhood. Her father had died when she 
was a baby and her mother had moved about from 
place to place selling books and leaving her 
children to form what associates they could in her 
absence. It was a haphazard sort of life and the 
girl had always looked forward to the time when in 
a family of her own she might have that which 
hitherto she had lacked. Her desire for affection 
laid her open to seduction and she had scarcely 
reached twenty years of age when a baby was born 
to her whose father’s previous marriage prevented 
him from becoming her husband. She left her 
mother and sisters taking the child with her. 

She now began wearing a wedding ring and 
spoke of herself asa widow. She almost succeeded 


220 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


in convincing herself of the truth of her story. 
When, before two years had passed, she was about 
to be confined again, this time having become 
involved with another man, she insisted that she 
had been assaulted. 

She gave the social case worker a most circum- 
stantial account of her marriage and even went 
with her to call upon the clergyman who she said 
had performed the ceremony. She was willing to 
prosecute the man whom she accused of being the 
father of her second child, although she had been 
intimate with several other men. 

The motive underlying all this was her desire 
for a normal family life. Rather than be wholly 
without it she preferred to imagine it. Thereby 
she was, of course, making impossible the attain- 
ment of the very thing she wanted. Realizing 
this the social worker tried to help the girl to face 
the facts of her situation so that she might 
ultimately free herself for the forming of a whole- 
some married life. The visit to the clergyman was 
only one of the measures taken to convince the 
young woman that she was not married and that 
it would be wiser for her to recognize this. When 
even the clergyman’s denial of the ceremony did 
not cause her to face the facts, the social worker 


DYNAMICS 221 


used for this purpose the prosecution of the father 
of the second child, the woman having entered 
suit upon the uninformed advice of a neighbor. 
The case might have been dropped but the social 
worker saw in it the one chance of clearing the un- 
realities from the girl’s life. Nor until the young 
woman had admitted the truth on the witness 
stand did she appreciate the extent to which she 
had been living on a false basis and begin to face 
life squarely. An opportunity now offered itself 
for her to make her home with a family. Here asa 
mother’s helper she spent a year that was happier 
than any other previous year in her history, the 
only shadow upon it being the death of her first 
child. She was made to feel that she had a genuine 
share in the family life, the nearest approach to a 
home that she had experienced. Then she met a 
man whose earlier career had been as unhappy as 
her own. In the marriage which followed she 
found the true realization of her desires, incident- 
ally after the birth of their first child reéstablish- 
ing for her husband ties with his own relatives 
which had long been broken. 

Undoubtedly it was in the having of a family of 
her own that the solution of the young woman’s 
problem lay. In helping her to clear her life of un- 


222, THE ART OF HELPING: PEOPEE 


reality the social worker prepared her for the 
happiness that she later experienced. And is one 
not justified even in a situation of this sort in tak- 
ing into consideration the possibility of marriage? 
After all most people marry and it is in the family 
that the emotional values of life can find complete 
expression; for here they are all mingled — the love 
of man and woman, the being together, the shar- 
ing of experiences, the sense of personal relation- 
ship with tradition, of oneness with past genera- 
tions; the satisfaction of the longing to belong 
somewhere, to have a place in the world, to have 
a refuge from storm, to feel the security of mutual 
confidence, of being emancipated from imperson- 
ality and of being personal, of being utterly and 
completely one’s self and of being thus beloved. 
Family life includes the whole cycle from child- 
hood to parenthood, but there is opportunity for 
renewal and strength in its every phase. Even to 
approximate it, as two women in their late thir- 
ties did in establishing a home of their own and 
adopting two children, is to find a sure vehicle for 
emotional expression. That is why there runs 
through nearly every one of the personal histories 
that have appeared in these chapters the effort to 
safeguard and develop family life. Let a man 


DYNAMICS 223 


have a happy family relationship and the making 
of all his adjustments is facilitated. 

Where this is not possible the use of every other 
available dynamic becomes of supreme impor- 
tance. Emotional expression through other chan- 
nels — through friendship, through the apprecia- 
tion and enjoyment of nature, and through the 
cultivation of any latent artistic abilities — should 
be encouraged. There should be a search for new 
goals, for new purposes. More mediums for the 
sense of achievement should be secured. The spir- 
itual life of men becomes, if possible, of even greater 
importance. Just as the person who is blind devel- 
ops a compensating alertness in his other senses, 
so must the individual who is blocked from one 
dynamic be helped to a larger and more varied use 
of the rest. 

But to contemplate the absence of any dynamic 
is as difficult as to conceive the loss of any of the 
senses. All are essential. All must be cultivated. 
The more and the broader a man’s contacts with 
them the stronger and the fuller will flow the 
stream of hisenergies. They are the very essence 
of life. Let him possess them and the mastery of 
the art of living will be his. 


CHAPTER XIV 
IN CONCLUSION 


What a piece of work isa man! how noble in reason! how infinite 
in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in 
action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the 
beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! (Hamlet, Act u, 
Scene 2.) 


THERE can be no conclusion to a discussion of the 
art of helping any more than there can be a last 
chapter in the art of living; for living continues as 
long as life, and life touches life subtly and un- 
measurably down through the generations. For- 
ever, while man is part of the universe, the process 
of adjustment will endure, always involving new 
relationships and new situations, shaping and 
changing him and carrying with it ever the issue of 
happiness or trouble. 

Each one of us, limited though his days may be, 
is caught up in the sweep of this vast ebb and flow 
of life. Nature working within him expresses her- 
self in terms of her own timelessness. She is un- 
hurried. Growth is a product of the years. Man, 
being but part of the whole, may become im- 
patient, content with what would be incomplete. 
Nature is comprehensive and eternal. 


IN CONCLUSION 225 


To have grasped this lesson is to have made a 
beginning of learning the art of helping. We are 
continually seeking the immediate. We search for 
panaceas and we want instantaneous change. Ina 
few days we would make different a human being 
who for three or four decades has been evolving 
to what heis. Yet ifthe body develops so slowly 
that in age one can recognize the youth, how can 
we expect greater rapidity in the transformation 
of personality which must express itself through 
the body and which is influenced by it. 

Unfortunately, our very books contribute to the 
illusion that change in man is an easy and an 
expeditious process. When in three or four hun- 
dred pages the biography of a lifetime may be re-. 
viewed, the years themselves seem to take on a 
kind of cinematographic speed and unconsciously 
we come to expect the same instantaneous devel- 
opment inthe people about us. The illustrations 
that have been used in the preceding pages may 
each have required a very few moments for the 
reading, but they represent for the most part 
months and years of effort. Moreover, these 
stories are cross-sections. They are not the whole 
life. The necessity of describing the application of 
a principle has placed an emphasis upon one in- 


226 THE ART ‘OF HELPING PEOPLE 


cident to the exclusion of many other important 
occurrences. 

Nor can it be said that after one, two, or three 
years an individual has achieved a permanent ad- 
justment. There is no such thing as permanency 
in adjustment, for adjustment is constant change. 
Always a new crisis is arising, a new event occur- 
ring; and the whole struggle must be gone over 
with again. Not until the whole of a man’s career 
is reviewed can a verdict be announced. While life 
is being lived, one can only say that thus far the 
individual has succeeded in overcoming his dif- 
ficulties and in building wisely for the future. 

In some situations a successful adjustment is 
not possible. There are wildernesses of the mind 
from which to the eye of present knowledge there 
seems to benoegress. This applies not merely to 
the person who is feeble-minded or who is suffer- 
ing from some chronic form of mental disease, but 
also to the large number of people who live in 
that psychic borderland which divides the clearly 
normal and usual from the clearly abnormal and 
unusual, the people of whom science admits its 
ignorance by such diagnoses as constitutionally 
inferior, psycho-neurotic, and the like. For these 
unhappy individuals any but the most temporary 


IN CONCLUSION 227 


adjustment is exceedingly difficult. They seem to 
be unable to hold long to any one course and they 
sink before the slightest waves of circumstance. 
With such persons, and with many others, our 
very ignorance often renders us incapable of help- 
ing where help is needed. Just as before the dis- 
covery of the antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus 
hundreds of people died whose lives might have 
been prolonged, so, for the lack of knowledge of 
many things we are unable to aid individuals 
in the making of adjustments that in the future 
may be facilitated through the development of new 
techniques. There are limitations, also, of phy- 
sique and environment which prevent the per- 
son in trouble from achieving anything but a 
life that, judged by the standards of persons of 
greater opportunity and endowment, would at 
best be unsatisfactory. There are great handicaps 
in the absence of the institutions which in time our 
municipalities and states will establish. It may be 
evident that the only solution of a man’s diffi- 
culties lies in a stay in a psychopathic hospital, 
but if there is no room for him he must forego 
treatment. The same issue arises in dealing with 
feeble-mindedness, in the treatment of tuberculo- 
sis, and in many other problems. Small wonder is it 


228 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


that often when success in helping a human being 
might be expected it is failure that is met with 
instead. 

On the other hand, the changes that take place 
in people are greater than we realize. In our 
search for the dramatic we overlook the very 
strength of nature’s workmanship. We expect a 
revolution and fail to see the far more certain, 
though more gradual, process of evolution. When 
we realize the handicaps under which the greater 
part of humanity labors; when we consider the 
close physical proximity in which most people live 
with one another, and the ignorance, and the 
malnutrition, and the lack of recreation, and the 
years spent in an unfavorable environment; the 
accomplishments of the weakest and poorest in- 
dividual become colossal. It must never be for- 
gotten that with life as it is to-day the greatest 
material achievement that most men can hope for 
is the bare support of a family on the margin of 
existence. It is only the person who is situated in 
especially fortunate circumstances, or who has 
very unusual combinations of native endowment 
and character, who can win the means of obtain- 
ing the cultural and esthetic opportunities that 
add much of beauty and interest to life. The vast 


'IN CONCLUSION 229 


majority of people live their lives through without 
even securing for their homes the kind of dwelling 
that would give them the environment they desire 
—no matter how modest their wants in this direc- 
tion may be. Yet, in spite of these and many other 
handicaps, men attain to happiness, attain to it 
out of the barest of equipments and with the 
least of facilities. 

No one who has watched the making of such an 
adjustment as the adjustment to tuberculosis, can 
fail to wonder at the marvels of which the average 
human being is capable. To realize the eternal 
watchfulness that is the means by which the con- 
sumptive wins the mastery of his life; to sense the 
steadfastness of purpose, the control of self, and 
the persistence which the living of a regularized 
existence involves; to appreciate what the fore- 
going of physical recreation and the limitation to 
his hours of activity mean; to realize all this and 
then to see men find contentment in spite of their 
disease, is to know that man can adjust himself to 
anything. 

The more one works with people in trouble, the 
greater his confidence in human kind and his 
respect for human beings becomes. Seeing what 
they accomplish in overcoming their difficulties 


230 THE ART OF HELPING PEOPLE 


brings an ever deepening faith in their capacity 
for self-help. Let a man be free to be himself and 
his success is almost assured. Aid him, if he asks 
it, to a realization of the adjustment which he 
must make, interpreting to him, if need be, those 
with whom he is associated. Quicken his desires, 
if quickening they require, or show him that from 
which he can derive stability and inspiration. En- 
courage him to make his own plans, and to do his 
own thinking, and through it all strive to see him 
as he is and to understand and appreciate him. 

This is the point of view from which social case 
workers approach the difficulties of the men and 
the women who come to them for help. It is a 
point of view to be sought by every person who is 
so placed that he may influence other people. It is 
as applicable in the daily relationships of life as 
it is in the most complicated forms of trouble. It 
is a philosophy that any one may apply to the 
making of his own adjustments. 

To him who thus strives to understand his 
fellows and their problems life begins to reveal 
itself in deepening richness and wonder. The old 
fears, the old prejudices disappear leaving him 
free to perceive the truth, the truth whose facets 
are myriad so that one may gaze upon it through 


IN CONCLUSION 231 


eternity and not make an ending. Out of life’s 
very difficulties, out of our own frailty comes re- 
newed appreciation of all that living can mean 
and the privilege that is ours in its practice. Who 
does not thrill at the miracle of being alive and of 
holding comradeship with that most marvelous 
of creatures, his fellow man! Transcending the 
vicissitudes of experience is the challenge of the 
greatest of the arts. 


THE END 









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